


We Are Nobody Else

by Qpenguin98



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Bonding, Canon Trans Character, Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Team as Family, Trans Character, and everything inbetween, god i love barry so much, you know in the stolen century way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 06:49:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 51,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14868803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qpenguin98/pseuds/Qpenguin98
Summary: "Barry Bluejeans is born one Sildar Hallwinter to Gregor and Marleana. "A character study of Barry through his lifetime that got much longer than I anticipated.





	We Are Nobody Else

Barry Bluejeans is born one Sildar Hallwinter to Gregor and Marleana. He never really loves his name, though he does love his mother, and his father when he can remember him. He died too early for him to get a less than fuzzy image of him in his head most days. His mother loves him too, well before she knows he’s a he and well after finding out. He sticks with Sildar for a while, just because he finds that it’s obscure enough that no one really attaches a gender to it. He doesn’t even consider Barry until a stranger on the street runs up to him, calling him “Barry! Yeah, you with the glasses and the jeans. You look like a Barry. Am I right?”

Barry sounds right, and he tells his mother when he’s fifteen that maybe Sildar isn’t cutting it anymore and that he’d prefer Barry. She gives him a stiff sideways grin that he smiles shakily back at. “Well then, Barry, you wanna grab the laundry for me?”

His body is something he tries not to think about too hard. He’s pudgy and hip-y and carries a little too much weight in certain places to look as boy/man like as he wants. There’s potions, of course, “man juice” as one of his friends helpfully dubs it, but they work slowly and they don’t get rid of the fat. He wears baggy jeans that get progressively less baggy as he grows more comfortable with his body as it changes, and it helps that it changes at the same rate as his human peers. Dwarves and elves and every other kind of person he grows up around change either so much faster or slower than humans, and often times they find it hard to decipher the strictness of human gender politics. He doesn’t get it either, but he isn’t exactly a paragon of human gender expectations.

He gets into magic when he’s sixteen, experimenting in a class. He finds he likes it, a lot, and gets as many books as he can on it. He’s not sure what class of magic he’d like to focus in yet, there’s so many different types and ways to use them all. Does he want to be a wizard? Not a cleric, he’s a little less than religious. Bard? While he’s decent at playing the piano, it’d be a pain to lug a keyboard with him everywhere he went just to cast a simple cantrip. Paladin? Same as a cleric but with more punching. Which isn’t a terrible idea, he’s just not so keen on the religion part. Multiclass? There’s too many options.

He settles in on wizard about a year later, in time to apply to colleges. Marleana wants him close by, but knows the desert town they live in, far from most major magic institutes, can’t hold him. The Institute of Planar Research and Exploration has the highest praise and he aches to go there. There’s so much magic, so much to learn there. He’s always known their universe was made of different planes, but he can barely find anything on the ones other than theirs in his school. He sends in an application and hopes with his whole being and more that they accept him. It takes weeks for him to get a reply, and when he gets their acceptance letter he’s glad he’s home alone so his mother can’t see him jumping around.

The IPRE is gigantic as he walks around it, staring in awe at the buildings. Domes everywhere. His dorm room is small but spacious. His roommate is a dragonborn named Jeffery who paints his claws a different color every week. Barry thinks they’ll probably get along fine.

When he turns twenty he gets his first tattoo on the fleshy inside of his bicep. A necromantic sigil that he thinks is the best way to signify him finally figuring out his major, disregarding the fact that he later finds the creator of the sigil’s research total bullshit. It hurts, more than he expected, and he definitely doesn’t let his eyes water as he makes strained, idle conversation with the artist.

There’s a lot more to learn about the planes than he could have dreamed. There’s ways to interact with them, but it can be dangerous and the conditions have to be perfect. His Intro to Planar Systems professor addresses him only as “Bluejeans,” assumedly because he only ever wears jeans. The nickname follows him out of the class and into his next level planar class. It eventually makes its way to the necromancy department, and he reluctantly adds to his file a few months into the never ending torment that his name is Barry “Bluejeans” Hallwinter.

When he’s twenty three he’s saved up enough money to finally get top surgery, keeping his ill paying job at the campus coffee shop just for this. He’s not graduated yet, because college was _much_ harder than he anticipated it being. He does have a tempting job offer as a lab assistant, however, and now that he’s covered his expenses for surgery, he’s considering it a little heavier. The coffee shop was nice and he loves his coworkers, but it is definitely not what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

He stares down at his body the week before he’s slated for surgery, looking at the little nicks and scrapes that have embedded themselves into his flesh over time. He realizes briefly that there’s probably an easier way to do this through transmutation that won’t leave him healing for a week, but he kind of likes the idea of the scars on his chest becoming one more part of his body that he can enjoy.

The healing is painful and he can’t lift his hands up too far, but it’s worth it when they unwrap him for the last time. He wishes his mother were here, but it was much too far to warrant coming. She wanted to, he knows, but neither of them are dripping in money.

Twenty five finds him with one degree finally, _finally_ , under his belt and him beginning work on another. They’ve offered him an adjunct position, teaching a few classes while he’s working on the next step up in the very sparsely travelled double major path of necromancy and planar physics.

It’s also when he finally meets Merle Highchurch. He’s working on an experiment, mixing things that he should probably be a little more careful with together to see what they’ll do. The resounding explosion finds him with part of the table in his stomach and a mouthful of blood. Someone from the next room comes in frantically, sees him sitting staring at the shard in his stomach, and runs out with a curse. They bring Merle along when they finally come back.

“This is gonna hurt,” he says gruffly as he pulls the table piece from his middle. It drags slow and sends pain shooting to the edges of his fingers. He bites his tongue, hard, and squeezes his eyes closed. “You gotta be more careful, kid.”

“Not a kid,” he chokes out around the blood in his mouth.

“Yeah? How old are you, twenty? Twenty one?” He presses a healing hand to his stomach and it absolutely hurts at first, but the wash over of healing magic feels incredible.

“Twenty five,” he says, head fuzzing out a little. He knows he has a baby face, that that never left him as he grew. Merle grunts in acknowledgement and pulls his hand away. He nudges Barry to get his eyes open. “I gotta make sure there isn’t anything else wrong with you. Pull up your shirt for me?”

He does as he’s asked, hands shaky as they grip the hem of his shirt and drag it up. The other person has left, probably to tell a higher up what the fuck just exploded and why the crazy healing plant man is down in Barry’s lab.

There’s another feeling of healing that goes over him and then Merle sits down, content. “That’s gonna ache for a few days, but you should be fine. You’re lucky you did this here and not at home, that table piece was real into you.”

“Spare the dying,” he mutters, grabbing the trashcan to spit out the blood. There’s more than there should be, and he wonders how hard he actually bit his tongue. The center of his stomach does ache, almost like he’s been punched, but it’s much better than the part of the table had been. “You the closest cleric?”

“Maybe? Not really sure. Albyn was in one of my classes last semester, probably thought of me first. Do y’all not got a cleric down here?”

“Probably. Never really gotten anything more than a scratch or a burn. I don’t like healing magically if I can fix it myself.”

Merle squints at him. “You’re Barry, yeah?”

“Yup,” he says, standing. The dizziness hits him very fast and he slides into the wall, leaning on it.

“Shit,” Merle says, standing quickly. “Didn’t think you’d be getting up so fast. C’mon, kid, lets sit. You lost some blood there.”

“’m not a kid,” he says, leaning on the dwarf. This is the one time he’s praised his shortness. It’s not terribly uncomfortable to lean on him as they shuffle to the chair he’s got set in the corner.

“All you humans are kids to me. Especially down here. All of you science types are nothing but babies. I swear they hire adjunct younger every year.”

“Afraid I’ll run you out of a job?”

Merle laughs. “As if. None of you can handle plants as well as I can.” He shoots him a wink and Barry shudders.

“Can you, uh,” he motions towards the mess of papers on his desk. “Grab me that notebook?”

Merle obliges, handing him a pen as well. Barry starts writing down exactly what happened when he mixed those two chemicals together and Merle snorts out a laugh. “You’re actually doing work after getting a piece of table blown into you? Most of the people down here that I know would use this as a chance to slack off.”

“I’m fine now,” he says, chewing on the pen cap in his mouth. “It was a different reaction than I thought would happen. More explosion and less simmering. I gotta record it.”

“A little too invested in your work,” he says, grabbing at one of the papers on his desk to read it. “You’re necromancy and planar physics, yes?”

“Mhm,” he says, scribbling down and equation to try for next time. He’ll probably want to put a shield up, just in case another explosion happens. And warn his lab neighbor.

“How do those two intersect? Obviously the Astral Plane, but what about the others?”

“I don’t do solely necromantic research on the different planes. There’s plenty of places for it to intersect, but it’s mostly separate. There’s someone higher up that’s trying to figure out how to travel between them to do some research, and it’d be amazing to be on that mission, if it ever happened. Right now I’m trying to figure out what happens when you mix certain elements under different types of pressure. I assume it’s different in the different planes, and if that travel ever does happen, it’s important information to have.”

He messed up a number in the last equation he wrote out, so he scribbles over it, frowning.

“Davenport’d like you.”

That name sounds familiar, but he’s not sure why, so he just grunts in acknowledgement. Merle puts his papers back and stretches his arms up. “Well, if you’re sure you’re not gonna kick it in the next hour, I’m gonna go back to my plants. Don’t be a stranger, Bluejeans.”

“Noted,” he says, looking up and giving him a smile. “And thank you. For the, uh, healing.”

“That’s half my job.” Merle waves and turns, leaving. Barry settles back into his work.

Merle makes it so he can’t be a stranger, addressing him in the halls, calling him “Mr. Bluejeans” so much that his students start doing it. Hallwinter is something he’s barely called anymore, only by his officials, never by students or peers. Never by other teachers. He goes and visits Merle’s little greenhouse section occasionally. The plants he keeps are in amazing condition, and he’s a little in awe of his blatant connection with Pan. Barry’s never ascribed to a deity, doesn’t think he ever will, but he can tell Merle made the right choice with Pan.

When he’s twenty six he watches someone die for the first time. It’s during a bar fight, if it could even be called that. A person comes in, tiefling, and someone from across the bar sees them. They yell something, and the tiefling looks stricken, turns to leave, and the other person, a half elf, shoots a spell at them. The bartender yells something about keeping fights outside, and Barry looks up from the papers he’s been grading in the corner. Some of this is clearly last minute work, but he can’t really fault them for that. It’s late in the semester.

The half elf doesn’t let up, snarling something about a grudge with their family and the tiefling’s, who’s trying their best not to hurt the person inching closer and closer to them.

Time moves very fast and the clearly wizard half elf pulls a knife out of nowhere and shoves it in and up through the other’s abdomen. There’s yelling, and the injured one chokes as the half elf drags their knife back out of them and leaves. The bartender stands there behind the counter, mouth open, staring at the blood seeping into the floorboards. Barry loses himself for a moment and then runs over when he gets his bodily control back. He’s got a spell somewhere, a healing spell, he thinks. He has to, doesn’t he?

He mutters a modified Spare the Dying, places his hands on the very bad cut on their stomach, and hopes to whatever’s listening that it helps.

It doesn’t.

They cling at his arms, claws digging into his wrists, but it doesn’t matter because his hands are getting soaked in blood and nothing he’s doing is working. There’s conversation all around him, buzzing in his ears, and is no one here a cleric? Is he the only one that can do anything? He can’t even get his stupid modified cantrip to work on this _dying person_.

The hands go limp around his wrists, and he shakily sits back, hands dripping into the ever growing pool of blood surrounding them. There’s police and questions and when everyone in the bar is finally allowed to leave, the blood has tacked onto his hands, pulling at his skin now that it’s dry. He makes his way back to the campus, hands shaking. Merle’s light is on in his office, and he knocks before he can second guess himself.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” comes grumbled behind the door, and the warm light and greenery greets him. Merle takes one look at him before dragging him inside and shutting the door. There’s another person here, a gnome with red hair, and he stares at them. They stare back.

“I’m Barry,” he says, voice gravelly.

“Davenport,” they say, and he nods. Merle said something about a Davenport a while ago, this must be them. Merle grabs him by his arm and drags him over to the sink.

“You wanna explain why the fuck you’re covered in blood?” He turns on the sink and shoves his hands in there. The water shocks him and he jumps, hands shaking again.

“You ever watch someone die, Merle?”

The other is quiet for a moment, and then there’s a sigh. “What happened?”

“Bar f- it wasn’t a fight. It was… some half elf gutted a tiefling in a bar and I couldn’t do _shit_.”

“I should leave,” Davenport says, and Merle waves a dismissive hand at him.

“You want him to leave? Totally understandable.”

“I don’t… know?” He can’t really think right now, and Merle nods at Davenport. He hears him leave, the door clicking quietly shut.

He looks down at himself for the first time, noting the way there’s blood covering the knees of his jeans, smeared on his shirt. He closes his eyes and takes a deep, deep breath. Then he vomits into the sink.

“There we go,” Merle says, patting his back. His hands feel filthy and he scrubs the blood away until the skin underneath it is red all on its own. Merle directs him to a chair and pours him a drink, which he drinks much faster than he probably should. He doesn’t comment and pours him another, setting a hand on top of it in an obvious “drink this slower” gesture.

“Death is my whole thing,” he says, staring at his glass. “My whole thing is bringing people back from it, and I can’t even save a dying person.”

“It’s a whole different ballpark working in theory and working in practice. Believe me.”

“You never answered my question,” Barry says, staring at the blood soaked into his jeans. He can feel it on the skin underneath them.

“Yes,” Merle says, dragging a chair over next to him. “I’ve watched someone die before.”

Barry nods and draws his feet up, curling into the chair. “I was fucking useless.”

“Hey,” Merle says, and he can hear the frown in his voice. “Kid, come on. You think I’m gonna let you sit there and berate yourself for something you weren’t prepared for?”

“Yes?” He asks hopefully. Merle sighs and scrubs at his face.

“I’m not. It’s not your fault they died, Barry. Did you gut them?”

“No, but—”

“Then it’s not your fault.”

“That doesn’t,” he grips at the glass hard to keep his hands from shaking again. He hates this. He was useless and Merle won’t tell him the truth. “That doesn’t mean I helped for shit.”

“Yeah, well, we all have our off days.”

He presses his lips together thinly and doesn’t say anything. He stares at the plant sitting next to him and doesn’t let himself think.

“Listen,” Merle says, and whatever joking tone he had is gone. “Watching someone die is a shitty, shitty thing to go through. It’s okay to feel fucked up and guilty about it. But you gotta know that it’s not your fault and you _tried_ , Barry. Did anyone else even try?”

“No—”

“Well there you go! You’re a step above everyone else in that bar. You tried, and yeah maybe it didn’t work out and that sucks some massive ass, but you tried. And that’s more than anyone else did.”

Barry refuses to say he cries, but it’s a lie that only him and Merle know the truth about. He stays there that night, falls asleep in that chair because Merle thinks he probably doesn’t need to be alone right now, and Barry trusts his judgement.

The next year his mother dies. She was older when he was born, more so than was advisable, and she lived a long life. He takes a leave from work and travels back to their desert town. Not a lot of people are at the funeral, some friends he remembers her having. He’s the only family left and he’s not sure how to feel about it.

There’s not much to sort through at his old house. Some picture albums, old trinkets, the blankets she made when she got really into quilting that one year. He packs most of it up, gives some of it away. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in the house, it hurts too much when he thinks about the fact that she’s really gone, that this is the last time he’ll have a reason to be here in this town, to pack up his wonderful dead mother’s things.

When he gets back to his apartment, he invites Merle over.

“You want a quilt?” he asks when he walks through the door.

“A what?”

“A quilt. I’ve got a lot right now and figured I’d offer you one.”

“Your mom made those.”

“Yeah, and I’m keeping the ones that are important to me. But there’s a lot. She got really into quilting for a minute there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Merle,” he says tiredly. “It’s just a blanket.”

Merle takes a quilt and Barry’s glad. More than just him has a piece of his mother now, and that’s comforting.

When he’s thirty he finally meets Davenport formally. He’s run into him a few times when he’s visiting Merle, never really thinks too hard about who he is. He assumes it’s someone in the biology department. The plans for planar travel are getting closer and closer, and it’s possible they’ll be able to do the Exploration part of Institute of Planar Research and Exploration within the next ten years.

He submits some of his research to the mission, just to see if they can use any of it, and gets a summons to meet with the head of the research team.

Davenport greets him, and he smiles. “You work for the exploration team?”

He looks at Barry funny. “I’m the head of the exploration team.”

His whole entire world comes screeching to a halt. “You’re the what?”

“Did you not know?”

“I—,” to be quite honest, he didn’t. He never learned the names of the exploration team, figured that he’d never get high enough up to meet them. Sure, the dream of being a part of the team was his biggest, but it was just that, a dream. He finally chokes out a “no.”

Davenport laughs, holding his hand out. “Well then Barry Bluejeans, it’s a pleasure to formally meet.”

He shakes it in a daze. He just got called Barry Bluejeans by the head of the planar exploration team. That’s it. That’s his name forever now. “You, uh, you called me in to talk about my research?”

“Yes!” Davenport invites him into the room they’re outside of, and the walls are absolutely filled with blueprints and notes. There’s perfect circles of precious stones set up, and he notes they only have five. “Your research is actually incredibly helpful. We hadn’t thought much about the reactions of certain chemicals together and the ways that effect would be different in the separate planes.”

He stares at the model for a ship set up on a table in the middle. It’s nearly as big as him, but knows that if it were to be created it would have to be much, much bigger.

“Necromancy works with bonds, yes?”

“Some,” he replies, readjusting his glasses as he tries to take it all in. “There’s certainly a bond that gets created when you’re working with bringing back people’s souls, or molding them into something you want.”

“Good,” Davenport says. “I think we may have figured out a way to power the ship we’d need to travel the planes. Fuel is something in short supply, and we don’t even have proof that it would work once we made it to the other planes. How much do you know about bond magic?”

“A little. It’s… old. And necromancy is old, too, all magic is, but bond magic is older. No one practices it anymore. It shows up in other school of magic, but I know we don’t teach how to harness it here.”

“Exactly. You work with bonds in your work. Very few, but there is bond magic written into all schools of magic. What if we could use that to power the ship?”

“Bond magic?” He finally turns to face him. “You’re talking about harnessing the bonds that people’s souls make to power machinery. That’s unheard of.”

“Bonds don’t disappear between planes, Barry. It’s been done, maybe not to power a ship, but bonds have been used before to make power, to empower. Harnessing that power would grant us the ability to travel between planes.”

“How is my research helpful in this?”

“Well, it did solidify that we can’t rely on chemical reactions in the other planes. Fuels haven’t been tested in the other planes. It’d be a risk, a dangerous one, to use the kind of fuel we’ve been using here in our plane out in the others and expect it to be safe and reliable.”

Barry nods. That’s reasonable, and he’s glad that his research had been helpful there, but that doesn’t explain why he’s been invited down to the research lab.

“We’re also wondering if you’d be interested in joining the research team.”

His brain stops. He blinks at Davenport for a solid minute before his brain starts working again. “You- you want… You want me on the team?”

“This doesn’t guarantee you a spot on the actual mission, of course. You’d have to apply for that just like everyone else. But we think you might be an asset.”

“I-I would love to be on the research team.” His voice is a hoarse whisper. “It would be an honor.”

“There’s no need to be so formal. It’s not as if we’ve never met before.”

“You’re offering me a job, I think this warrants a little formality.”

Davenport offers his hand again and Barry wipes his on his jeans to make sure he’s not giving a clammy sweaty handshake. It’s firm and binding and he wonders if this will really all work out so smoothly.

He’s thirty five and the fucking bond engine doesn’t want to work. He groans, flopping his head onto the table. His pencil jumps as he thunks onto the metal.

“C’mon kid, you got this.”

“Why are you down here again?” Merle isn’t a part of the research team, but he regularly shows up in their lab.

“Because I know everyone in this department well enough to get away with some rule breaking.”

“Well it’s not helpful.” He can’t figure out how they’re going to harness the bonds of the crew. He knows it has something to do with the old magic, that his meager knowledge of bonds through necromancy probably isn’t going to cut it. “Tell me about clerical shit.”

“What, like me and Pan?”

“Exactly that. How does it work?”

“Well I grew up worshiping Pan so there’s never been a massive disconnect. It’s a lot of baseless trust that pays off once you really figure out how to trust your deity. It’s a two way street, you trust them to imbue you with magical abilities based around worship and they trust you not to use that magic for stupid shit.”

Something clicks for Barry. “So it’s… prior bonding? You don’t just choose a deity and boom comes the magic?”

“No, no. Lotsa prior bonding. Have to worship for a little to get any of the perks, you know what I mean?”

“Uh huh,” he says, writing this down. He writes some modified sigils down as well. This is new. He hadn’t thought of this. He’s been trying to use the bonds that people made with others that wouldn’t be with them. It makes sense that the crew of the ship would have to be bonded with each other to get the engine to work.

“You figure something out?”

“Maybe, gotta test it first. Any idea where Davenport is?”

“Meeting I think. He should be back soon.”

Barry sets to work on a prototype, a small engine, just for kicks, to see if he’s right. When it’s done about a month later, sigils in perfect place, handheld and stable, he asks three people that have no connections with each other to join him. Him and Merle should be good enough for his second test, and these strangers should be good enough for the first, but he needs a very old, strong bond for the third.

“I think I know some people,” Merle says, and on the day they’re testing it, he brings in a pair of elves, identical, and he almost can’t tell them apart.

“Okay!” Davenport starts. “We’re going to place you in a room with the engine and see if you make it work. There’s no danger here, just testing.”

The three strangers go in first, and the one in front presses the on switch. Nothing happens. They wait a few more minutes. Still nothing. That first stranger shuts it off again.

“Alright,” Barry says. “Now I need you three to go get some food together, eat, and talk to one another. Tell each other about yourselves. Favorite color, where you grew up, some fears, some dreams. As personal as you’re comfortable getting. We’ll give you about an hour or so to get to know each other and then we’ll come back, sound good?”

He gets an affirmative and they go off to do as he’d asked. Now it’s time to wait. They want to test bond levels, not go straight into the bigger bonds.

“So,” one of the elves says. “You’re Barry Bluejeans.”

“Uh, yes?” The IPRE had stopped listing Hallwinter as his last name for the class lists, placing Bluejeans in instead. He doesn’t mind. At this point it’s more comfortable for him than his given last name.

“I’m Lup,” she says, smiling. It doesn’t look genuine. “This is Taako. It’s an absolute _pleasure_.”

They’re overwhelmingly attractive, and for the first time in years he feels almost self conscious. He coughs into his hand and smiles back. “Likewise. How do you know Merle?”

“Oh we were in one of his classes last semester. Filling in that biology credit, you feel?” Taako takes over now, and he seems almost cat like. His mannerisms are different from Lup’s, just slightly. “He’s got a real big hard on for plants, so it was maybe for sure the weirdest botany class I’ve ever taken.”

He thinks he remembers hearing something about these two from Merle and maybe Davenport. They’re excellent students, top of the class constantly, and yet they barely seem to care. It’s interesting.

“And how do you know Merle, Barold?”

Barold? “Oh, he, uh, he may have healed me from a piece of table getting stuck in my stomach a while ago.”

He can see the laughter bubbling up in Taako before it bursts, and he presses a hand to his head while laughs. “You got a table stuck in your _stomach_?”

“It got blown up during an experiment, piece of it caught me right here.” He points at the middle of his stomach. “Hurt more coming out.”

“Oh, are we talking about the time you were a dumbass and almost blew yourself up?”

“I didn’t blow myself up, I blew up a table and it hit me. There’s a difference.”

“Oh Merle, do tell us about Mr. Bluejeans’ crazy antics in the necromancy department. I’d love to hear them.” Lup leans in close on his shoulder and he maybe gulps.

They trade stories back and forth about each other for the next hour, and when the three strangers finally come back, Barry realizes that the only thing he learned about the two was their names. He thinks it might have been intentional.

The second go around with the three gathers them a low pulse in the engine. It’s weak, but it’s definitely on. He lets out a cheer and Davenport writes it down.

Next is him an Merle. They step in. “You wanna do the honors?”

“Nah,” Merle says. “It’s your engine after all. You turn it on.”

He steps forward and does, and it whirs on, a little stumbling at first but it steadies out into a gentle hum, white light spinning around the inside of the circle. He’s not sure what he would have done if it hadn’t turned on for them. Yelled probably.

Next are the elves. They step in with grace and Lup, he thinks it’s Lup anyway, flips the switch to turn it on. The white light is bright immediately, spinning around the middle and the edges of the engine. One of them gives him a thumbs up through the window and flips it off once they get the go ahead.

“Conclusion,” he says once they’re back in the main part of their lab. “The crew needs to know each other at least a little bit before they take off. They have to have bonds for the engine to feed off of. If some of them know each other really well, or they’ve known each other for a long time, it’d be great. Lup and Taako could probably power the ship themselves.”

“So they’ll need a while to get to know each other, and they need to be compatible,” Davenport confirms, and Barry nods.

“Exactly. Now, what do we need for a crew?”

“A captain,” Davenport says, like they don’t all know it’ll be him. “A science officer, arcanists, and a medic. We’ll probably need a biologist, just in case we find some wildlife out there.”

“Food,” Merle says. “Don’t forget you’ll need someone to make food.”

“And write it all down,” Barry adds. “They’ll need a chronicler.”

“A guard?” Merle suggests. “Someone to keep all you nerds safe from threats out there in the planes.”

“And they all need to be compatible. Excellent. That should be easy.” Davenport’s voice is dry.

“Well there’ll be plenty of applicants. This project’s had popularity since the beginning.”

“Doesn’t mean that everyone’s capable of bonding with each other. We’ll want to give it a year, maybe. Have everyone picked out a year before the actual mission so they can learn to be comfortable around each other. To bond.”

“We have to finish the actual plans first,” Barry says. “create a working prototype for the ship. Get a name.”

“Then we’d better get to work.” Davenport smiles at him, and Barry grabs his pen.

He’s thirty eight and they are a year out from the actual physical take off of The Starblaster. Him and the other scientists had figured out a way to make the engine work with outside bonds, harnessing energy from the Light of Creation. It cuts down the amount of bonding time the crew will need. Having the bonds close by and fresh, though, is helpful, so they’re still having mandatory bonding alongside the preparation classes.

He’d almost not expected to be accepted. Sure he knows the workings of that engine and the ship inside and out, and knows more on the subject of the planar system for travel than probably anyone else but Davenport and maybe Merle, but he’s not particularly easy to bond with. At least he doesn’t think so. Davenport thinks differently, or he just wants someone who knows how the ship works up there with him.

It’s an interesting group they’ve got. Davenport, of course, and himself and Merle. He’s glad he’d managed to coerce him into putting in his application, even if it did go in late. The elves he met through Merle are there as well. Chefs and arcanists, master classed in both. Lup is an evocation specialist and Taako is incredible at transmutation. There’s a human named Magnus that they’d taken on as their guard. He’s twenty and massive and one of the nicest people Barry thinks he’s ever met. Their chronicler is another young human named Lucretia, twenty three and quiet. She barely ever puts her notebooks down.

Their first bond session does not go great. Taako and Lup give away exactly nothing about themselves other than their names, again, and Magnus keeps getting distracted. He seems like he needs to do something with his hands to be able to focus on anything, and he knows Davenport is making a note of that for next time, to have activities. Lucretia writes down their dialogue and says few words herself. Her dark hair is pulled back into a tightly braided bun. Merle tries to break the ice with a bad, ill timed, plant joke that only Taako laughs at, and Barry’s pretty sure it’s a malicious laugh more than anything.

The second time, the next week, is much better. There’s no upright chairs, the floor or beanbags strewn about as their options for seating. He knows Davenport wants this to work out, and he’s doing his best to accommodate everyone. The room they’re in is small, not a lot of room to be apart from each other, but enough room to sit comfortable with his own space bubble.

“Okay,” Davenport starts, and he pulls out a deck of cards and a handful of spoons. “We’re going to play Spoons and get to know each other. Everyone know how to play?”

There’s nodding all around, but from the corner of his eye he sees Lucretia’s hands still on the paper. Her brow furrows and her mouth pinches, just slightly, and Barry knows she doesn’t want to speak up.

“Actually, Davenport,” Barry says, and he sees her look at him. “I could use a refresher on the rules? It’s been a long time since I’ve played.”

This is a lie. He played Spoons with the research team two weeks ago. Davenport and Merle know this. The rest of them do not. Davenport nods at him and goes on to explain the rules. Lucretia seems to relax a bit, and the atmosphere goes back to tentatively comfortable.

“I’m Barry, uh, Bluejeans,” he says in the middle of the round. “You all knew that, I’m sure, but I feel like we should introduce ourselves again. I’m thirty eight and the head science officer for The Starblaster, not that there’s really any other science officers, but I guess I’m the lead one for if we pick up any others.”

“Davenport,” Davenport says next to him. “I’m a hundred and thirty six and the captain for The Starblaster, and I’ve been working on this exploration project for way too long.”

“Taako,” the elf says next. “I cook food and turn bad shit into rad shit. I also call dibs on first shower. I’m not about water turning cold.”

“Lup,” she says next to him. “I also cook food, but I blow things up instead of changing them. Much more fun.”

He notes that neither of them give their age.

“My name’s Merle Highchurch. I’m a hundred and twenty four and the medic and biologist, so if you ever have any plant questions I’m your dwarf. Also if you get hurt I guess.”

There’s some stilted laugher from around the circle. Barry grabs a spoon as the attention shifts. He sees Lucretia nab one as well.

“I’m Magnus Burnsides! I’m twenty and the head, and only, guard. I, uh, haven’t really got much more than that.” He shuffles his cards together.

“Lucretia,” she says quietly. “I’m twenty three and I’m here to record the entire mission in explicit detail.”

Her hands never stop scratching words into the notebook, even as she passes her cards along. Lup and Taako seem to have caught onto the spoons disappearing as he watches both of them nonchalantly grab them.

“Some fun facts?” Merle spins his spoon around his fingers, and he sees Davenport blatantly not grab one. He’s waiting, he realizes. He wants Magnus in the next round. “Like, I don’t know, something we should know about you. Something more than your rank, name, and age. I’m a cleric, follower of Pan, and I think every plant is special in its own little way.”

Taako makes a gagging noise and Magnus finally realizes that there’s only one spoon left and grabs it triumphantly. “Hah!”

“Aw, dang,” Davenport says, standing and throwing his cards into the middle. “Guess I missed out. Anyone want some drinks?”

“What do you got?”

“Punch, tea, and water.”

Lucretia gets a water, Magnus takes punch, Lup takes tea and Taako takes water, Merle gets tea, and Barry takes punch. The IPRE punch is actually decent.

“Taako and I are identical twins,” Lup says when Davenport comes back with the drinks, shuffling the cards together. She has a smile on her face to looks incredibly unfriendly. Taako’s ears flick down for a moment before popping back up. Identical twins is… oh. Something hopeful flutters in his chest. Magnus opens his mouth to say something and then shuts it again, nodding. Her smile gets even more predatory. “That an issue?”

“No!” Magnus looks entirely too apologetic for this. “No, no it’s not. Sorry, my brain works a little slow on connecting things sometimes.”

She nods and passes the cards to Taako after grabbing her set. His face is very flat. “I get night terrors, so don’t be alarmed. It’s just a regular old Taako thing.”

Davenport passes out the drinks. “This mission has been my entire life, and I’m absolutely stunned that it’s actually going to happen.”

Barry takes his cards. “Merle’s the reason the institute changed my legal last name to Bluejeans. It’s actually Hallwinter, but no one’s called me that in years.”

Lucretia takes her cards as she’s scribing. Her hand grips the pen tightly for a second before she speaks. “I’m very bad with people and I apologize if I come off stand offish.”

“I’ve got some focusing issues and sometimes I get really sidetracked even during important stuff.” Magnus drinks the punch and his eyes light up a bit. He doesn’t say anything more.

The mission creeps closer and closer until the year is almost up. He’s finishing up what to pack. They’ll only be up there for two months, so it’s not like he needs a lot. He packs one of his mother’s quilts and a variety of jeans and shirts. A few trinkets, but it really isn’t much. He doesn’t want to bog down the ship with things. He’ll be back soon enough.

And then the world gets devoured and they’re sucked through wiggly space to a whole different planar system and he realizes that he’s never going to see any of the people in his life again or have any of the things that mean so much to him again, and he chokes.

Merle sits with him that first day, curled up in his mother’s quilt in the sparse, so empty, corner of his room. He can’t get his hands to stop shaking, but his breathing is unnervingly even.

“It’s all gone,” he says. “What the fuck was that shit?”

“I have no idea,” Merle says gruffly. He had family left on their world. Barry had no one, but he feels so empty.

“This sucks.”

“You said it.”

He realizes about a month and a half into their stay here on this animal planet that he only brought enough testosterone for, at most, three months. He realizes this at the breakfast table.

“Fuck,” he says halting his bite of pancake.

“What is it Barold? These pancakes not good enough for you?”

“No, I just realized I only brought enough man juice for three months. _Fuck._ ”

Lup snorts in her juice, and wipes at her face once she’s stopped laughing long enough to swallow her drink. “ _Man juice_?”

“One of my friends called it that when I was growing up and it stuck. But _fuck_ I don’t know how to make more.”

“Man juice?” Magnus asks. “What the hell is man juice?”

“Testosterone, Maggie, get with the program,” Taako says, flipping another pancake onto his plate. The twins seem to be taking this in stride, and he wonders if they knew. Or, if because of Lup, they just don’t care.

“Eh,” Merle says. “There’s gotta be a way to mix some up with your excellent science skills and my plants.”

“If you know the components I can transmute you some,” Taako says, and the whole table turns to stare at him. The easy demeanor leaves his shoulder. “I mean, if I’m feeling like it. Fuck, you guys are like hawks.”

“I know the components,” Lucretia says quietly.

“Cretia, you been holding out on us? What’s your dirty queer secret?”

“I’m a massive lesbian,” she says deadpan, but her face is darkening very quickly. Lup slams her hand down on the table and laughs out a “ha!” “But my brother was trans, and I wanted to know as much as I could.”

“Huh,” Magnus says, taking another bite of pancake. He’s giving Barry an interesting look and he feels a little squirmy under it. “Cool.”

“ _Very_ cool, Magno. Tack that Very in there.”

“ _Very_ cool, Barry, thanks for sharing,” Magnus says, scrunching his face up at Lup.

“Perfect!”

Lup and Taako may look the same, but they couldn’t be more different. It comes out slowly, over months. Taako’s more bitter, a little less open to making friends with the rest of them than Lup is. Lup’s laugh starts out as a snort before growing into something louder while Taako’s gets bitten back behind his teeth. Lup smiles a lot easier than her brother does, and it’s a little crooked and lopsided and he absolutely loves having it directed at him.

The mongoose family is nice, and it’s fun to learn their language. Taako seems to particularly connect with them, which is interesting to watch, considering how guarded he still is around all of the team. Lucretia tags along with them sometimes, just to write down what their interactions are like. She picks up snippets of the language but never learns it fully. He translates in a quiet voice as she writes down the conversations they share.

The sky goes grey and he stares at it heavily that last day. They’re getting the Light soon, maybe, if the animals decide they’ve proven themselves. It looks like a storm, but it’s still. Just like it was back on their world. He can feel the anxiety in his crewmates, and hopes it’s just a natural storm. The skies were still naturally back home as well.

It’s why no one thought anything of it, his brain helpfully supplies.

And then as the Royal Beasts are arguing, holding the Light out between them, the sky gets even darker, and he feels a chill go up his spine. Black shimmery _something_ shoots down from the sky, directly onto the Royal Beasts and the Light. His stomach drops and he can see the twins turn and book it back towards where the ship is. He doesn’t really think, just follows them. Lup is taking shots at the inky black things coming from these thick stems of darkness and when she slows down too much Taako grabs her by the wrist and pulls her faster. His lungs are screaming at him, but it doesn’t matter because this thing is everywhere around them.

They’re on the ship, and Davenport is steering them away, and he watches as the world falls to ruin below them, and then Lucretia, in a very small voice, speaks up.

“Where’s Magnus?”

Barry looks around, and he thought he couldn’t feel worse, but when he finds no sign of Magnus, the bad feeling takes over almost completely.

“I think he stayed, to help,” Merle says, and he comes up next to Barry to stare down at the planet.

“Are we just leaving him?” Her voice cracks a little.

“We can’t—” Davenport says, and he sounds choked off. “We can’t turn back. We can’t go back for him. He made a choice.”

Lucretia doesn’t say anything, but she clutches her journal closer to her and stares out at the thing destroying yet another plane of existence.

Taako is muttering something that sounds nasty in Elvish, and Lup is answering quietly back, and he can’t understand either of them, but it doesn’t matter because he can guess.

And then space goes wiggly around them yet again and his body moves without his knowledge and he sees Magnus, right up at the front of the helm. He’s got a black eye, and Barry turns and sees Merle with a cut on his head, and they’re all in the same clothes they were in a year ago, and his brain kind of breaks a little, because this definitely should not be happening. There are a lot of things that he can explain with science and this, currently, is not one of them.

“What the fuck,” Magnus says in shock. “What the fuck, I just _died_.”

He pats at his stomach and his chest, staring down like there should be something there, but there’s not. His hands clench up and he tries to take a deep breath and turns towards Davenport, who’s staring at him like he, well, died and reappeared.

There’s a lot of questions and Magnus looks very overwhelmed until Merle yells at everyone to back off and tells Magnus to go get some rest and try to relax.

They’ll learn that this happens every time, that every time they escape from the inky darkness that tries to consume everything they’ll end up back in the same spots, the same states they were in before, that dying doesn’t matter anymore.

The first time Lup dies, in year four, Taako gets very withdrawn and doesn’t let anyone close enough to touch him the entire rest of the year. He doesn’t eat most of the food he cooks for everyone, and Barry realizes with careful memory that it’s not because he’s upset, it’s because she’s not there to make him. So he tries to remind him, when he doesn’t think it’ll hurt more than help.

He dishes them up food, slides all their plates to them, and either tries to slink out of the room or get an early start on the dishes.

“You’re missing a plate,” Barry says casually one night, and Taako’s glare is almost enough to make him back down. But he keeps staring at him until he huffs and dishes himself up food, sitting down next to them and eating. It may be a smaller portion than he gave the rest of them, but he does eat it all, so Barry counts it as a win.

If he leaves before he can nudge him into eating, he’ll dish him up a plate later that night, knock on his door, and leave it outside of his room. Taako hates wasting food, he knows, so Barry’s certain that he’ll eat it. Or give it to Magnus if he’s available to pawn it off to. Either way, Barry knows that Taako knows who’s leaving him food, and if it gets him a nasty look or two, he can handle it.

Year five rolls around and Lup corners him that first night.

‘Thanks,” she says, looking him directly in the eyes. She’s much taller than him, so she’s looking down, but it’s direct eye contact.

“For… what?”

“The food thing,” she says, and he hadn’t really expected Taako to mention anything about it to her, definitely not so soon. “Making him eat.”

“Oh that’s- he wasn’t eating and I figured no one really wanted him to end up… yeah. No, yeah, it’s not something you need to thank me for.”

She rolls her eyes a little and pops her hip. “Come on, Bluejeans. You know he’s not the best at taking care of himself and I’m thanking you for looking out for him. Take the thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he says, and she nods. “But are you, how are you?”

“How am I what?”

“With the dying thing.”

“Oh, that.” She smiles at him, but it doesn’t curl up on the left side which means it’s not fully real. Why does he know that? “It’s just a little death, babe. Not like it really means anything in the grand scheme of things anymore. I slipped on a rock and hit my head, no big adventure deaths for Lup yet.”

“It’s fine if you’re not fine about it,” he says, and curse his mouth for continuing to talk about this. She obviously doesn’t want to.

“I mean it sucked, yeah, but for me it was like a second and then I came right back. Worse for you guys than it was for me.”

“Are you—”

“Barry,” she says tiredly. “Drop it, my dude. I’m back, it’s good. We’re good.”

He nods and they go back to what they were doing, and the cycle restarts.

He dies for the first time in year six. The people of this plane do not like them, or they don’t like humans. They only have a problem with him, Magnus, and Lucretia, so they try to stay on the ship as much as possible, but he feels useless cooped up inside the ship and goes out anyway.

They’re hostile to humans, and he wonders what the ones that used to live here did to make them so averse to them. He’s out with Davenport and Taako, taking in some of the energy sources from the surroundings, and some of the locals spot them. Taako slaps his hat on his head immediately, to try and disguise him, but it’s not fast enough, and that’s when the yelling starts. The closest descriptor for these people would be gnome, but they’re a little more dryad like, but not dryads. It’s a lot, but they’re fast, and they very much dislike the fact that Barry is alive and anywhere near them.

He gets it, he does. Humans did some fucked up shit in their home plane too. But he would appreciate a little less hostility thrown his way.

He’s got his hands up to show he’s not intending to hurt them, but it’s not enough, or it’s seen as a threat, and they’re surrounded and he can see Taako’s ears pressed flat to the sides of his head, and he feels a little ridiculous in his giant hat. Davenport’s trying to be placating, but it’s not really working, and he doesn’t see the knife until the last second.

Getting stabbed in the stomach _hurts_ , more than the last time he’d gotten the piece of table lodged in there. Briefly, he wonders if this is what that tiefling felt before they died as the knife gets drawn up and out of him. Taako shouts something and there’s bright light and the gnome person is frozen solid and the others are retreating. Barry grabs at his stomach and slumps back until he hits a tree he can sit against.

“Barold, my dude, I’ve got jack for healing spells.” Taako crouches down next to him, along with Davenport.

“We can go and get Merle,” he says, turning, and Barry grabs his wrist.

“Too far,” he chokes out. “It’s all good. ‘s fine.” It hurts, a lot, and there’s no rush of healing magic over him as he bleeds into his fisted up hand. They sit with him until the world goes grey.

And then he wakes up back in place on the Starblaster, no pain, no bleeding, as fine as he was seven years ago. Huh. It really is immediate. He’s wondered what that felt like. Not horrible. Sure the dying was bad, but after is perfectly fine.

He feels surprisingly fine. A little less when he thinks about how he knows what that tiefling felt as he died on the floor of the bar, but for the most part he’s fine. He slips back into research. Lucretia sits with him in the lab sometimes, when Lup and Taako aren’t there, stays and writes while he sits and experiments.

“What was dying like?”

He gives her a sidelong glance when she asks that. “Haven’t you asked the others?”

“Yes, but it’s always different. I’m trying to figure out the main parts. There’s always a lot of emotion, and you’re a scientist, so I thought maybe you’d be able to give me a more removed perspective.”

“I mean it depends on how you die, I think. Mine was painful, but I don’t think Lup’s was. Hers was quicker, and I sat there for a while. Do you want to know the pain part or the actual dying part?”

“Both?”

He doesn’t mind talking about this with Lucretia. She’s curious in a way that doesn’t make him feel stared at and pulled apart. She’s opened up more recently. Everyone has. They’ve all been together for seven years, eight if you count the year of bonding and training. Barry would almost say this feels like a family.

“It’s, uh, the pain part was a lot of it for me. I’ve been stabbed in the stomach before, but not that badly, and Merle was close by so I was fine—”

“You’ve been stabbed in the stomach?”

“Oh, yeah.” He pulls up his shirt and points at the faded scar that was left. “I blew up a table on accident while testing some chemicals and a piece of it got me right there. It hurt, but this hurt more.”

Her brows furrow and she starts writing again. “Why, do you think?”

“Maybe it’s just time? It could’ve hurt the same and this one’s just fresher, I don’t know. But this was definitely sharper, and the pain lasted for longer, until the end. No healing magic to help there.”

She nods. He takes a look at her. Her eyes look tired, her hair isn’t pulled back nearly as tight as it usually is. Her hands stutter over their writing and he turns his chair towards her fully.

“Are you okay?”

Lucretia jumps a little, looking at him confused. “What? Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You look,” he waves a hand, searching for the right word. He can’t come up with anything better than “tired.”

She twists her mouth and stops writing. “It’s just… I haven’t died yet. I don’t know how it feels so I can’t accurately write about it. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to die, Barry. I know it doesn’t mean anything, but I _don’t want to_.”

“Good,” he says. She stares at him. “You shouldn’t want to. It’s not bad that you’re scared, Lucretia. This is scary. All of it. The plane hopping, the Hunger, dying. It’s all freaky as fuck. It’s okay to be scared of it. I am.”

She looks at him like he’s given her some sort of lifeline, and he wonders what they’re doing wrong to make her think she can’t come to them with this.

“You all seem so put together about it,” she says eventually. “I wasn’t certain that anyone else was feeling the same.”

“Are you kidding? Of course we are Lucretia! Dying and coming back again like nothing ever happened is fucked six different ways. We’re not aging and we have to keep doing the exact same thing every year with different planes and different people and sometimes it goes so bad I don’t want to think about it, and just because you’re the ‘chronicler’ doesn’t mean you can’t talk to any of us, alright?”

Lucretia nods and pauses for a moment before flipping her journal closed, slipping the pen back into its holder. “Would… you tell me about yourself Barry? More than you have.”

He smiles and starts to tell her about his father that he can barely remember and his mother with her soft grey hair and loving words and all of her quilts and the way his last name left him naturally and turned into Bluejeans. He tells her about meeting Merle and the first time he watched someone die, the same way as he did, and losing his mother. Little things about the science team for the Starblaster, what that eight years working on planar travel theory was like.

She in turn tells him about a mother that travelled too often, a father who taught her to read and write, and a younger brother who kept his hair long even after he came out. About not finding anyone to talk to in school, absorbing herself in books and writing, becoming a ghost writer, a young one at that. There’s an undercurrent of pride in her voice that makes him smile. It’s the longest he seen her go without writing anything down, and he can tell she’s itching to grab her pen and record all of this, but that’s for later. Now is for learning more about each other.

Davenport find them absorbed in storytelling an hour or so later, calling them up for dinner. Lucretia takes one look at their captain and bursts out laughing from a story he told her about the time Davenport had a little too much to drink in the lab and tried to pilot the model Starblaster. He is, of course, very confused as to why Lucretia, quiet Lucretia, is laughing so loudly at him.

The sound draws down Lup, followed by Taako, both of them wearing aprons. “Your laugh!” Lup says, staring at Lucretia. “It’s great!”

“Why are we laughing?” Magnus says, popping his head around the doorframe. Merle is grumbling something about dinnertime and people not letting him eat behind him.

“Little man,” she giggles out, “littler ship.”

“Wh- Barry,” he says, raising an accusatory eyebrow. “What exactly were you talking about?”

“Oh, Lucretia just wanted to know more about me, so I told her about some of my time with the planar research crew,” he says, grinning.

“Oho, Dav,” Merle says, coming up and giving him a sympathetic pat on the back. “Rough luck.”

“What’re they talking about, Cap’n’port?” Taako leans in close. “What dirt could our lovely Barold have on our nothing but responsible captain?”

“Nothing,” Davenport says. He turns to leave, slipping out of Taako’s grasp. “Dinner.”

“Aw, no fun. Bring the mood up, Dad’n’port! Tell us about your rowdy days at the IPRE!”

“I’ll tell exactly nothing and it’s dinner time. Go eat your food.”

“We had a model ship in the planar research lab,” Barry says, and Davenport groans loudly, accepting his fate as Magnus prevents him from leaving. “It was about me sized, give or take a little. It was very much stationary.”

“What happened to the ship?” Taako asks with way too much glee in his voice.

“Well we occasionally had a few drinks in the lab. Irresponsible, sure, but also very good for breakthroughs. Davenport had a few too many and thought he’d demonstrate his flying prowess on our model ship.”

Lucretia is giggling behind her hand next to him and Taako looks like he just handed him the world on a silver platter.

“The ship didn’t fly, obviously, and he was very much too big to stand on it, so it may have tipped over after he ‘turned’ it a little too hard.”

“No,” Lup says, grin spreading.

“Yes,” Davenport mutters from behind his hands.

“I used to have pictures, but I didn’t bring them with me. Davenport looked particularly captainly standing in that tiny little boat.”

“A lapse of judgement,” Davenport says. “One single time I did something stupid in that lab.”

“Oh I wouldn’t say that,” Merle says. “But for your sake I’ll save it for later.”

“You can’t leave me like that, tree man! You can’t leave me hanging waiting for the next bad Davenport story.”

“You waited seven years to hear this one, I think you can wait a little longer.”

Lucretia’s still laughing, holding her stomach tightly with her arms. It’s little giggles at this point, sucked back behind her lips. Lup still looks delighted at this, looking affectionately at her, and Barry really does feel like this is a family. Lup shifts her eyes to look at him and her grin gets a little more devious and she winks at him. He snorts and feels a small flush crawl up his neck.

“Alright,” Davenport says sharply, trying to regain any control he had over this conversation. “Dinner time. That’s what we’re doing now. Let’s go.”

In cycle ten he finds a piano. It’s old and probably out of tune and tucked away in the corner of the house he’s exploring, but it’s a piano. This civilization is abandoned, or at least this section of it is. They’re looking for records, books of history, or books of lore, what kinds of magic they might have used.

He brushes his fingers over the dusty keys. It’s been a long, long time since he touched a piano. Before he started teaching adjunct.

He presses a few, a simple melody he learned as a kid. It’s not horribly out of tune, the middle G key sticks a little, but it plunks out the notes that he wants.

“You play?”

Lup’s voice floats in from the doorway and he jumps, pulling his hand away from the piano.

“It’s been a long time.”

She raises an eyebrow and walks into the room fully. She comes over and inspects the instrument, wiping a finger across the top and making a face at the dust. “I learned a song or two, back when Taako and I were with our aunt. That was before I decided I liked the violin better.”

She plays a small song, simple, one handed and a little clunky. He doesn’t recognize it, but he’s inexplicably reminded of his mother sitting next to him, hands demonstrating which keys to press to make which chords. She was so glad when he wanted to learn the piano, pulling out old sheets of practice music, taking time out of her busy, busy schedule to show him how to play. He hadn’t bothered to keep up with it when he went away to college, busy with schoolwork and keeping his head above the water, and then teaching, and then planar research.

It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

When she finishes he pulls the cover over the keys. “It’s been a long time,” he says again, quieter this time. She doesn’t push, thank the gods, but she does grab his hand and squeeze it lightly. He pulls himself back together and gives her a smile he knows doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Come on, Bluejeans,” she says gently. “Let’s go do your specialty: flipping through old books by dead dudes on dead stuff.”

He follows her to the latest seemingly necromantic book her and Taako have found to try and decipher it and doesn’t, definitely doesn’t, let his mind stray back to the piano.

Barry finds himself back there a few days later, pulling at his robe anxiously. Lup isn’t here this time, farther off in the town with the others. He’d gone off on his own, slipping between cracked plaster houses to find this dusty old musical item.

He lets himself sit at the seat, hands reaching out over the keys. He feels young, younger than his body is, which is a rarity these days. He wants his mother there, her subtle rosey perfume sinking into the air next to him as she picks out a song to teach him.

He hasn’t let himself think about Marleana Hallwinter in such a long time. With a start he realizes he can’t picture her face fully. His memory is off, because he knows her nose didn’t look like that, but he can’t remember what it _did_ look like. There’s a lump in his throat. He swallows it back and scrunches his eyes closed.

With shaky muscle memory, he forces himself to press out a simple song from when he was first learning. His fingers are fumbling and he doesn’t get all the chords right and it stings. This was something he was proud of. Something he considered using magic with before he settled into wizard class. He doesn’t slam his hands against the piano keys, though he wants to. The air is still here, playing too loud will disturb that. It doesn’t stop him from hunching over the thing and trying not to cry.

“Hey!” Magnus calls when he tries to slide back into the area they were in unnoticed. “You find anything cool over there?”

Lup and Merle are there with him, taking a break and chatting over some sandwiches. He’s tossed one and bites into it.

“Oh you know,” he says, wiping at his face to get any of the redness to go down. “Just more old buildings.”

Lup’s ears are perked towards him in a way he doesn’t understand, and she gives him a look before going back to her sandwich.

He goes back a lot that year, practicing more and more songs until he’s confident he knows how to play his chords again. He gets followed by Lup one day, not that he knows it at the time. He’s playing random chords, trying to make them into something, and his fingers slip. He curses at them, wringing his wrists out and glaring at his hands.

“You should bring that on the ship,” comes from the doorway, and he jumps again, slamming the cover over the keys.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says shakily, looking at Lup standing in the doorframe.

“You’re clearly attached to it. Don’t think I don’t know where you sneak off to every week. And you’re not half bad at it.”

“Don’t lie,” he says, suddenly self conscious. He never played for anyone but his mom, and once he learned how, he barely did it when she was home. Having people hear him play an instrument that used to mean so much to him claws his insides up with anxiety.

“Not lying,” she says, coming up to rest next to him. “Just observing. We could use some music on the ship other than Merle singing bad renditions of dwarven classics.”

“Not sure what I’d do with it,” he says honestly. “I feel like it’d probably just sit there and collect dust.”

“What are you talking about? You obvi want to play. I don’t know why you’re so secretive about relearning the piano. It’s not like we haven’t been living with each other for ten years. You’re allowed to have hobbies other than what you got hired for.”

“I know that,” he says. “Playing in front of other people is… not exactly my strong point.”

“Then don’t. Play in your free time. Lock the door so no one can get in to listen. You’re gonna hate yourself if you leave it here, Barry.”

That’s probably true, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge that. He’s still got pieces of his mother with him. It’s not like he’s not got a quilt on the ship. He’s got himself. But the piano is itching to be taken. He sighs, resigned.

“You can’t tell anybody about this.”

“Barry, my guy, no one’s gonna give a shit if you play the piano in your free time.”

“ _Please_ , Lup.”

“…Fine, I won’t tell anyone. You’ve got me sworn to secrecy.”

“Help me move this?” He stands up, brushing off his jeans. Lup brightens up at that. He doesn’t want to disturb the delicate tuning job he’s done on it so far, so they levitate it gently, sliding it through the door with the seat stacked on top. No one is on the ship today, all of them down planet side to inspect some of the magic books they’ve found. Lup and Barry move the piano into his room, in the front corner so people won’t immediately see it if they walk into his room.

“Really Barry,” Lup says. “You don’t have to worry about us fucking flocking you to stare you down while you play piano. Well, maybe you have to be worried about Maggie doing that, but that’s just because he cares too much.”

“I know,” he says, hand rubbing the back of his neck. “I know that, I just… it _has_ been a long time since I played anything decent. And it reminds me of my mom a lot so I feel like it’s too personal for the group to know about.”

“Well your secret’s safe with me,” she says, miming zipping her lips shut. “Until Magnus or Taako busts into your room and figures it out for themselves.”

“Good enough,” Barry says, pulling the seat off of the top of the piano and setting it down.

“You ready to go see what Cap’n’port’s so excited about? I hear they found something on bond magic.”

“Like the actual theory behind it?”

She nods, and he straightens up. “Then let’s go!” He practically runs down to where they’re circled around a book. It ends up being mostly false, almost like bedtime stories, but they do come across some nuggets of truth underneath it all.

Cycle thirteen is not a great year for Taako. Barry’s not sure why the year starts out crummy, but he’s snappy at everyone, even Lup, who just ignores him until she gets tired of it and then snaps right back.

And then Lup dies because she shoves her brother out of the way of a trap net that ended up having poison barbs on it and he recedes pretty far into himself.

Barry’s pretty sure Magnus has offered his bed up for cuddles at night time for him, and that Taako has reluctantly accepted. He doesn’t talk much during the day, cooks portions that are just enough for five people and leaves before Barry can even get a say in him eating his food.

He witnesses the aftermath of a night terror halfway through the year.

He’d gotten up for a glass of water in the night, shuffling down the hallway and up the stairs. Magnus’s door is open, and when he peeks inside he finds the bed only contains Magnus, no elves in sight.

His eyes are sleepy and groggy as he makes his way into the kitchen, and he almost doesn’t notice Taako. He mumbles a quiet “hey” when he catches sight of him, and it’s all he can do to jump out of the way before a magic missile is speeding its way towards where he was standing.

Taako clutches his wand with a white knuckled grip. He stares at Barry until the fog in his eyes clears and he shakily lowers the wand.

“Shit, Taako that was close,” Barry says when he stands, glancing at the scorched spot on the wall.

“Mmm,” cracks out of the elf as he repockets his wand, crossing his arms and narrowing his eyes. He doesn’t say any other words, but his gaze is hostile.

“Why are you up?”

“Could ask you the same question, _Barold_.”

“Needed a glass of water,” he says honestly. “Now why are you up?”

“Mags fuckin’ snores.” That’s not untrue, but Barry knows it’s not why he’s awake. “Too loud for my delicate sleeping conditions.”

Barry hums and reaches around him to grab a cup. He gets a little too close and Taako shifts back a bit, inching away from him. Barry frowns and turns the empty cup in his hands.

“If you want me to leave I’ll get out after getting the water. You don’t have to go just because I’m here.”

Taako audibly scoffs. “As if I’d let you getting some water remove me from the kitchen, which is my space. I don’t give a shit if you stay.”

“Cool,” Barry says, and he settles into a chair, sipping at his glass. It’s quiet for a while. Taako grabs a box of crackers from the store room. He munches on them idly in the silence.

“D’you speak elvish?” The question comes from nowhere and Barry raises his head to look at him.

“I know a few words, but not a lot. I definitely wouldn’t say I speak it.”

“Cool, cool,” Taako says, and then he starts speaking words that Barry doesn’t understand. He catches a few snippets, something about Taako doing something, and he catches Lup’s name a few times. He’s not meant to understand this, and he’s sure it’s something intensely personal that he’ll never hear in common, but his voice is lilting and quiet and gets choked up at one point so Barry sits there and watches him speak words he should definitely learn but hasn’t. It’s relaxing. His ears are reading as sad and distressed, and Barry reaches out a hand across the table. Taako halts for a second, staring at it before tentatively grabbing. He squeezes lightly and Taako starts talking again.

Barry’s half asleep, resting on his arm, staring half lidded at Taako’s hand in his when he finally, probably accidentally, says something in common again.

“It’s my fault she’s dead,” comes broken from across the table. He wakes up fully and abruptly. Taako’s staring at the stove, chin rested in his free hand.

“It’s not,” he says, and his ears pin back. He’s clearly thinking over what words he’s said, realizing he’s slipped back into a language they all understand.

“Mmm, well, that’s your opinion, jeans boy. My opinion is that I was an idiot in the woods and didn’t look where I was stepping and Lup got all the backlash.”

“She’ll be back,” he tries, and he watches the side of Taako’s mouth quirk up.

“Sure will,” and it sounds hollow. He unwraps his hand from Barry’s and stands. “Not that this hasn’t been fun, but I’ve got some beauty sleep to get back to and you,” he waves a hand dismissively at him, “have got to get rid of those eyebags.”

Barry stands too, downing the rest of his water before Taako can leave. “You can be open with us you know. You don’t have to keep everything all cooped up.”

He gets a sharp grin in return. “Oh? What fun information that I can take with me. I’ll be sure to keep it in mind next time you wanna get all weepy together.”

“Taako—”

“You keep this shit to yourself, yeah?” Taako comes in close to him, and he’s not smiling anymore. “You keep your mouth shut about this.”

“Sure,” he says, and he watches as the tension leaves his shoulders a little. “But you have to start taking care of yourself.”

“Dunno what you mean. I’m doing great.”

“You’re not eating. Or sleeping well enough to get any rest. I’m not gonna sit and watch you die because you refused to do basic health stuff. And I’m not keeping it from Lup when she comes back either.”

“You’re more menacing than people give you credit for. You could use that, you know. Scare some people in the future for information.”

“Say yes or I’m telling Davenport.”

“Oh! The telling the ‘parent’ game. Real scary.”

“Taako, please,” he says, and his voice is tired. “Just eat dinner with us. Actually try to sleep. That’s all I’m asking here. I don’t want to watch you fucking waste away because the one person you let coerce you into actually taking care of yourself isn’t here.”

Taako’s quiet, and Barry looks up at him. His ears are drooped low and he’s looking at him with furrowed brows. “You actually care.”

“Yes?” He crosses his arms. “Did you think I didn’t?”

“No, just…” Taako doesn’t fidget, but he gets close to it. “Yeah, fine, fuck it. I’ll eat dinner with you chuckle fucks.”

“Everyone on this ship actually cares, you know.”

“Neat,” he says, snapping his fingers and pointing at him. “I gotta go sleep. For real. Good night.”

He slips out of the room before Barry can say anything else, and he’s left there, feeling confused and sad, and he’s not sure what to do with the information that Taako doesn’t think anyone actually cares about him on this ship besides Lup.

He asks her about it, casually, one night when she’s finally back.

“You and Taako don’t actually trust us, do you?”

She cocks her head at him. “How do you mean?”

“Taako didn’t have a great year, and I talked to him about it, and he said ‘You actually care.’ Like that wasn’t a given.”

Lup hums. And then swings around to face him fully. “You grew up in a little town and had a family that loved you regardless of what you did, yeah?”

“Yes,” he answers carefully.

“We had that, with our aunt. And then she died. And we didn’t have that anymore.”

A few things are clicking in his head. They don’t talk about their growing up pretty much ever. Everyone’s said a few one offs about their families at least, but Lup and Taako always seem to skirt around the topic.

“Oh,” he says, and she nods.

“We had each other and that was it. For years. So it’s a little weird having five new people who suddenly start caring about you like you’re their family. Thirteen years is a lot of years, but it’s not a lot of time for elves. Taako’s a little less trusting than I am, not that I’m all that trusting. So it’s just an adjustment. He’ll figure it out.”

Barry nods and Lup nods, and he wonders how long it’ll take for the both of them to fully figure out how much the Starblaster crew cares about them. How long until they understand that they are family.

It takes a while for him to understand that his healthy admiration of Lup isn’t actually just admiration. He notices the tilt of her smile when it’s genuine and the way she pulls her hair back and up when it annoys her. How when the year she finally cuts it, sheared short on the sides and a little longer on top, there’s a breath of relief when everyone has only compliments. How her walk is different than her brother’s, a little heavier footed. She only wears make up when she has to, if there’s a formal event on the plane they’re in, or if Taako takes the time to sit down and make her up like she wants.  How she fights her way through the Hunger with prowess and strength and tries her hardest to protect the beings on the different planes, even if they’re snobby and mean.

And then Taako says the word “love” in cycle twenty one and it slams into him full force, that he’s had this underlying longing for twenty one years. And when she catches his glasses from falling and hands them back to him, he can feel the blush spread over his face, stammering out a thanks as he goes to sit next to the fire again.

He’s not sure what to do about this. There’s the obvious choice that he’ll probably take, which is ignoring it and hoping to the gods that it’ll go away, because if he fucks it up he’ll be stuck on a ship with her for the rest of eternity. But now that he knows about it, now that he knows that he’s in love, how could he be so dumb not to know that it was love, it’s difficult to ignore.

Barry ultimately decides to leave it as it is. He can pine silently in the background. It’s not like they don’t have things to work on. They still have to figure out what the Hunger is, and why it’s consuming every plane it can, why it continues to go after the Light of Creation.

Cycle twenty three is his bad cycle. It starts fine. He’s searching for the Light with Lucretia. She wanted to practice some magic, and figured he’d be a good judge of how she’s doing. She’s working on a shield spell. Abjuration was never something he really considered doing for himself, but she seems to be taking to it well.

And then there’s an animal, angry that they’ve gotten so far into its territory. It jumps and he moves to grab her out of the way, but she seems to think this is the perfect time to demonstrate the spell she was working on, trying to create a shield around herself to keep the thing away, but she’s under practiced and under pressure and it fizzles out before it can be any kind of effective. The shriek she makes when it gets its claws into her rings in his brain and he blasts it back, making sure it’s not coming back before running over to her.

There’s claws mark dug into her neck and across her chest and there’s so much blood. He presses his hands against the worst of it on her neck, but he knows it won’t help. She looks up at him, and he can see all the fear and pain in her eyes. She was afraid of dying, she didn’t want to die, he knows that. And yet he’s useless as he sits there, holding her close, recoating his hands in blood as she chokes on it, gasping for air until she shivers and goes still. Her eyes are still open, and he slides them shut with bloody fingers.

He takes her body back to the ship, and this is the first time she’s died, so they bury her in the soft dirt and Merle says something quiet for her burial, even if she’ll be back in nine months.

She’ll want this year recorded, curse herself for not being there to write it all down, so he takes it upon himself to write as much of it down as he can. He’s nowhere near as good a writer as she is, but he knows how record data, so he tries to embellish his notes a little. Make them a little more fun to read.

She was scared of dying. She didn’t want to die. She trusted him with that, years ago, and he sat with her and watched her bleed out and choke on her own blood.

He doesn’t sleep as much, the quiet of trying to lay down and close his eyes filled with her scream before she went down, with the look in her eyes as she stared at him. She looked young, so much younger than she actually is. And he sat there and covered his hands in her blood and did nothing.

He writes when he doesn’t sleep, details about the team this year, the way they act without her there. What foods Taako and Lup make, the differences that Merle finds in the flora, the way Magnus seems a little sadder having the one person that was in his age group gone, how Davenport’s a little more cautious on the ground now.

He doesn’t write about himself, because he doesn’t think he’d like the way he’s acting if he actually sat down and read it. He’s tired, a heaviness in his eyes even when he does get some rest. He thinks he might be skipping meals, accidentally, just not showing up to them and forgetting that the ache in his stomach is from the lack of food. He munches on the bread he’s got stored in the lab, drinks old glasses of water when he remembers to.

He’s tired, but there’s so much to write down. He needs to record everything for her. Her journals are intricate, organized with every detail she can fit into them. But he’s not good at this, so he writes and writes and there’s still more detail that he needs to fit in. It’s not like he could go to sleep anyway.

Taako finds him in the lab one night, lamp on, hunched over the journal scribbling away. He knocks on the door and Barry jumps up, readjusting his glasses.

“Oh you look awful,” he says, setting down the plate of food in front of him.

“What time is it?”

“Well time is fake and all that good shit, but it’s three in the morning. A little late for your delicate human sleep patterns, no?”

“Can’t sleep,” he says, eyeing the plate of food. “What’s this?”

“Uh, dinner? You’ve not been eating, Bluejeans. Don’t make me call you a hypocrite.”

“Too busy, guess I forgot.” He spears at the food with the fork he’s been given, and when the taste touches his tongue, he realizes exactly how hungry he is. He eats the plate probably too fast while Taako stares at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Why are you taking over journaling? It’s not like we couldn’t just tell her what happens next year when she’s back.”

“She’ll want an accurate recap, and it’s not accurate if it’s done later.”

“Come on, Barry, you need some sleep. What’s that thing you told me about watching me ‘waste away?’ That, but aimed at you this time.”

“Taako, I’m fine—”

“What you are is not fine. You’re doing a fair amount of self blame right now, I can tell. Blame yourself for her getting killed, yeah?”

He stares down at the notebook, eyes blurring over the words. He can barely understand what he’s written it’s so scribbled. His head hurts and his eyes burn and he’s _tired_.

“She was afraid,” he says, and he doesn’t know if this counts as a breach of Lucretia’s trust at this point or not. “She didn’t want to die, she was afraid of it. She told me a while ago.”

“Mmm, and you were there when she kicked it for the first time. Gotcha.”

“You think this is funny.”

“I never said that,” he can hear the seriousness in Taako’s voice and doesn’t look at him. “You said that. I’m saying what happened, and why you’re blaming yourself for her getting herself clawed up in the woods.”

“I… she trusted me with that and then I just let her die.”

“You don’t have healing magic, Barry. There’s not much you could have done other than died in her place.”

Barry’s quiet. He’d thought about that, if it would have been better if he’d jumped in front of her, take to worst of the claws to his body and died instead.

“Ohhh, don’t like that silence. You shouldn’t be thinking that, either.”

“She’d be here now. You’ve dealt without me for a year.”

“Losing anyone sucks, alright? You know that. Don’t talk about dying in her place Mr. ‘Oh you have to take care of yourself Taako, you can’t feel guilty.’ You don’t get to feel guilty either. She’ll be back. You’ll be fine.”

He blinks his eyes closed and all he can see is her glassy dead open eyes and reopens them.

“Alright, either we’re waking up Cap’n’port and you’re talking this out with him, waking up Merle and you talk this out with _him_ , or you go and sleep with Maggie because he’s the best at getting people to fall asleep. Take your pick.”

“Can I just stay here?”

“Not an option, kemosabe. You got three choices. Choose.”

“Magnus.”

“Figured,” he says, grabbing Barry’s arm and yanking him up. “Let’s go.”

Magnus is happy to scoot over and let him in, wrapping an arm around him and falling back asleep. Taako salutes him from the doorway before leaving and closing the room off from outside light. Magnus is warm and solid, and he snores lightly. Barry’s lulled down and down until he finally passes out, head against his chest, burning eyes finally closed.

Taako and Lup take turns dragging him into meal time, shoving him into a seat and watching until he’s finished eating a healthy human sized portion. Merle claps him on the arm sometimes, brings him back into the world, and Davenport checks in to make sure he’s sleeping. It makes him feel like a child, but he supposes he deserves it for locking himself up at night and doing nothing but writing illegible recounts of the days.

Magnus saves a spot on the bed for him, scoots over before he even falls asleep and wraps an arm around him when he crawls into his bed to get some rest. Taako’s right about him being good for getting to sleep. His solid and heavy and drags you down into sleep with him.

When Lucretia reforms on the front of the ship, he drags her into a hug before doing anything else. She startles against him, but relaxes into it after a second. After a few days he gives her the rewritten journals, better handwriting this time.

“I know it won’t be nearly as good as your writing, but I figured you’d want at least a half assed account of last year.”

“You wrote these?”

“I tried,” he says. “Really, I know you’ll probably rewrite them, please do actually. Just, I didn’t want you to miss out.”

“Dying wasn’t bad, Barry,” she says looking at him. He sucks in a breath and she nods like she expected it. “It hurt, you were right, but then I was right back here like no time had passed. You don’t have to blame yourself.”

“Lucretia…”

“Magnus told me you didn’t do well last year. Because I died and you blamed yourself. Don’t, please. I know… I know I told you I was afraid, and I was, and I am, but you being there with me made it better.”

He rubs at his face. The bone deep tired hasn’t left yet, and he’s still exhausted, even with his reformed body. She pulls him into another hug and he holds her close because she’s real and alive again.

He’s still exhausted constantly. He’s not sure what from, but he thinks it might be the weight of their mission finally catching up to him. Last year was rough on him, and the effects haven’t left.

He passes out on the couch next to Lup one day, and he must slide down because he ends up with his head on her shoulder as she reads through a book from a few planes ago. He wakes up and he doesn’t feel any better rested, but the shoulder he’s on is soft and a little boney, and he glances up with tired eyes at Lup’s face. She acknowledges him with a look before looking back down at the book.

“Looks like someone’s finally awake. You took a pretty big nap there, babe. Dead to the world.”

He sits up and stretches out. Sleeping did nothing, and he reaches out for the cup of coffee he’d had earlier. It’s cold and disgusting, but it’s caffeine. Lup makes a noise, and he glances at her over the top of the mug.

“You drink hours old coffee? Nasty, disgusting, downright horrible.”

“Taste’s bad, caffeine’s good.”

“Doesn’t really seem to work on you that much.”

“It doesn’t,” he says, placing the mug back down. “But I can pretend it does.”

“Yikes my dude.”

“Mm.” His eyes feel like weights as he stands. His feet stumble a bit, but he rights himself, scrubbing at his face and displacing his already askew glasses.

“You good?” Lup stands too, dogearing her book page. She presses a hand to his arm to steady him.

“Tired.”

“Still?” She removes and replaces his glasses, settling them correctly on his nose. “You took a like three hour nap just now.”

Is that how long he was asleep? He’s a little surprised that she stayed there. “Always fucking tired,” he mumbles, straightening his shirt. He should probably get down to the lab to work on some more experiments with the Light.

“I’m not an expert on humans by a long shot, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how you’re supposed to feel.”

“It’s not, but it’s fine.” From about nineteen to twenty four he was tired all the time too. He’s just gotta get back into the swing of not feeling rested ever. It’ll go away eventually, probably next cycle when his body reforms and is nice and new and fresh again. Or it won’t. He’s not really sure how the reforming thing works. They’re presumably reliving the same year however many times they flip into a new plane, but it’s still weird.

“Hey,” she says, drawing his attention back to the now. “You got all ‘lost in thought’ there, mister science officer. I think you should probably figure out why you’re tired all the time and fix it.”

He snorts and she grins. And then she focuses in on his face again and frowns. “Your eye bags are like, ridiculous. For real, Barry. That’s not healthy.”

“Eh, it’ll go away eventually, did before.”

“Before?”

“Was tired all the time my first like five years of college. It went away after a while.”

“Mm, nope, I’m not gonna let you sit through five years of being absolutely fucking exhausted. Merle’s gotta have something for that, right? He’s a cleric biologist, that’s the perfect intersection for this.”

“It’s not really that bad.”

“Yeah, you say that but you can’t see yourself, so for me it’s that bad.”

He tells her he’ll ask Merle about it and puts it off until he can tell she’s itching to shove him into the conversation herself. Merle’s got a greenhouse set up in the spare room by his bedroom. They got some lights that act like suns, which are particularly good for the years with bad atmospheres for the plants. He knocks on the doorframe before entering, knowing he’ll be in here.

“You got a minute?”

“Yeah, just help me out here? Hold this pot for me.”

Barry holds the pot in place and Merle gingerly transfers the plant from a smaller pot. The roots look a little cramped in the packed soil, and he massages them out of the tight coils they’ve put themselves in before pouring some dirt in.

“What’cha need?”

“Well, _I_ don’t really need anything. Lup thinks I do, but that’s because she’s overly concerned.”

“Mhm,” Merle says, brushing his hands together to get most of the dirt off. “So what does Lup want you to talk to me about.”

“She wants to know if there’s any way to make me not tired all the time.”

Merle raises an eyebrow at him, as though asking him to elaborate. Barry sighs. “I’m exhausted all the time. It doesn’t matter how much sleep I get or water I drink or whatever, I’m just tired. And I guess it’s visible? I didn’t think it was, but she thinks differently. And while it’d be nice to not feel crummy all the time, I really don’t think it’s an issue.”

Merle looks at him closely and then winces. “Ah, shit, you do look tired.”

“Comforting.”

“You got anything else for me? Any reason why you’re tired? Ever happened before?”

“Yeah, actually. My first few years at the institute I felt fucking dead. Which was especially neat because I chose necromancy as a minor and it became a real big fun joke. I think it started last year? I kinda figured once Lucretia was back and we’d talked it over things would go back to normal but they didn’t. Felt real tired then and I still feel tired now, except I’m actually sleeping now so I’m not sure what’s wrong.”

“You didn’t do great your first couple years of college, right?”

Barry makes a noise that sounds disappointed. “No, I did really bad. Because I was an idiot and thought I could float by when I really couldn’t, and then I kept trying it because I couldn’t get motivated to actually go to class or do any of the work.”

“How’re you feeling motivation wise right now?”

“Uh,” he’s not really sure what this has to do with him being tired, but he’ll play along. “Eh? I know I need to do things, and I’m doing them, but it’s a lot. That’s my whole job, the science officer, which means researching the shit out of the Light and figuring out how we can use it to stop the Hunger. It’d be nice if I actually figured anything out ever.”

“You feeling heavy?”

Merle’s leaning against one of his tables now, fiddling around with one of his plants. Barry crosses his arms and leans against the wall.

“Yeah, a little. I mean, this whole forever ship is pretty heavy, yeah?”

Merle hums, fiddling around with the leaves. “Think you might be a little depressed, kid.”

“That’s not—,” he cuts himself off, thinking. It’s actually not that improbable, and the idea that he was depressed during his first years in college is _definitely_ not unfounded. He chews at the inside corner of his lip. “Huh.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah that- that tracks I guess. Shit. _Shit_. That’s like the exact opposite of what we need.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I need, I don’t know, full brain power to figure out how to get us out of this? I know we’re in it together, but this is my actual job.”

“Barry, it’s been more than twenty years since anyone gave a shit about jobs.”

“That’s my thing, Merle. And I know I can work through it or whatever I’m gonna need to do, but we could do without a garbage brain on this ship.”

“You were ready to brush this off as nothing like two minutes ago. I don’t know how you jumped from ‘this isn’t a problem’ to ‘my brain is garbage and does nothing for our cause’ so fast, but it’s not sounding too great.”

“I… I don’t know.” He pulls his glasses off and scrubs at his eyes. “I don’t know. I’m a grown adult, this shouldn’t be an issue. Like, I get it for way younger me? But I’d be in my sixties at this point. You’re supposed to have it together at that point. If we’re going by my physical age you’re supposed to have it together in your forties. If I’m just tired all the time for no reason it’s better somehow.”

“Well that’s some bullshit,” Merle says, putting his hands on his hips. “Come on Barry, don’t be an asshole to your _self_. You think anyone on this ship’s got their shit together? We’re stuck in a never ending loop where we can’t die for good ever. You’re allowed to be depressed about it, for Pan’s sake.”

He stares at the plants and doesn’t say anything. Merle sighs.

“Well if you’re gonna be difficult you might as well be productive. Exercise helps, or it’s meant to. We’ve only got one fighter on the team, and he’s good at it, but all of us spellcasters are shit when it comes to actual real life combat.”

 _That’s_ an idea, him learning how to fight. He’d never really considered it, being a fighter. Magic was always so cool. It’s still cool. But Merle is right, Magnus can’t really protect them all the time, especially when he dies. If he can get himself any more energy it’ll be good.

“If y’all wanna join, Mags is setting up a cuddle pile,” comes from the hallway, and Barry turns to find Taako leaning against the outside wall. He wonders how long he’s been standing there, waiting for there to be an opportune time to interject.

“Yeah,” he says instead of asking. “Yeah, sure, we’ll be up in a second.”

Taako gives him a nod and slinks back down the hallway. Merle claps him on the arm. They follow up not long after.

Merle makes Davenport join in from his spot opposite the growing pile of people, shoving him in next to him and Lucretia. Barry finds himself with his head on Lup and his legs on top of Magnus with Taako laying on his middle. Magnus and Lucretia are talking quietly, with some occasional interjections from Merle or Davenport. Barry’s not really listening. Lup is warm underneath him and Taako’s warm on top of him and he’s being lulled into sleep very fast.

“Hey,” Lup says, pinching his ear to pull him out of the half asleep state he’s in. “Magno didn’t set this thing up so you could fall asleep right away.”

“I mean, that’s what always happens,” Magnus quips, focusing in on their conversation.

“Warm,” Barry mumbles, raising a hand up to cover her mouth with. She pulls her head back and laughs.

“Jeezy creezy, Barold, pull yourself together,” Taako says, turning his head to face him. “Quit flirting with my sister when I’m literally laying on you.”

He’s a little too tired to feel as embarrassed as he should, so he just flicks at one of Taako’s ears to get him to shut up. One of Lup’s hands finds its way to his hair. He nudges Magnus with his foot to get his attention.

“Hey,” he says. “You should teach me how to fight.”

Taako gives him a look out of the side of his eye but doesn’t say anything. Lup’s hands stall for a second.

“You want to learn how to fight?” Magnus sounds confused. “You’ve got magic.”

“Yeah, but you’re our only fighter and the rest of us are real bad at anything close range.”

“It’s not a horrible idea,” Davenport says. “Having two fighters would probably be beneficial.”

“Yeah. Yeah! Okay, have you ever been in a fight before? One without using magic.”

“Once,” he says tentatively. “Uh, yeah, once.”

“Okay, how long ago and did you win?”

“When I was sixteen and absolutely not.”

Lup laughs above him and he can hear Lucretia’s quiet giggle from the other side of the pile.

“Right,” Magnus says, and he sounds very amused. “So this is gonna be hard, because you’ve got exactly none experience.”

He smiles and pushes his glasses up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’re gonna kick ass though.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind when you inevitably wipe the floor with my body.”

“It’s a learning experience, Barry. I didn’t just get born with expert punching powers.”

“Coulda fooled me,” Taako says, stretching out his arms and narrowly avoiding hitting Barry in the face.

Magnus does, in fact, accidentally wipe the floor with his body once he starts training him. He gets knocked over so hard he skids across the floor and just lays there for a minute before rolling over onto his back.

“Ow,” he says flatly as Magnus offers him a hand up.

“Come on,” he says. “You’re not hurt are you?”

“Just my pride,” he says as he grabs the hand and stands. “Which I didn’t really have much of anymore so it’s not that bad.”

“Exactly! What’s pride on a ship full of people you’ve lived with for twenty years? Nothing, that’s what.”

“Did I do anything right that last time?”

“Well, your stance was bad, and when your stance is bad everything is bad, so no. You gotta keep yourself centered. You’ve got a lower center of gravity than I do, so it’s a little difficult for me to explain, but you can use that in fights where people are bigger than you. You have to feel steady, and you can’t get moved by me pushing you like this.” Magnus shoves at him and he stumbles to keep upright.

“I get your point,” he says as he resettles back into a stance. Barry stands with his feet apart and knees bent, and Magnus kicks his ankle.

“Too far spread. Closer together there and you should be close. Alright, lets try this again.” Magnus pushes at him, and while his stomach flips like he’s gonna fall over, his feet stay firmly planted. A delighted noise comes from Magnus and he claps. “Yes!”

Barry wants this to be a montage filled with cool fighty themed music like Fantasy Eye of the Tiger, but it takes a while for him to be anywhere close to decent at sparring with Magnus. He has a solid grasp on how to make a fist, but actually throwing a punch is rough. He was very, very bad at blocking anything coming towards him, got himself swatted a few too many times for comfort, but he’s better at it, raising an arm or dodging out of the way now.

He practices between finding the Light and, when they have it, testing it. Seeing what it does. He goes down to talk to the locals when they’re hospitable.

Lup finds a violin in cycle thirty three. An old antique market her, Barry, and Lucretia were poking around in had one, disgustingly out of tune, but in very good shape. She’d refused to look outwardly excited about it in the shop lest the shopkeeper notice and up the price, but Barry could tell she’d been thrumming with energy about finally having a new thing to play with.

When they get out of the shop she shows them in a little more detail.

“You’ve gotta help me tune it,” she says. “I know you keep that piano in key. All I need is for you to play the notes.”

“You’ve got a piano?” Lucretia asks, and both Barry and Lup realize what’s been said at the same time.

“Uh,” he says eloquently. “…Yes?”

“Where did you get it from?”

“Cycle… ten?”

“You’ve had- where do you keep it?” She looks almost offended. “You’ve had a piano since cycle ten and haven’t told anyone? Why does Lup know?”

“She helped me move it,” he says sheepishly. “I probably wouldn’t have brought it if she hadn’t made me. It’s in one of the corners of my room. I keep a sheet over it most of time with some stuff on top so it’s not all that noticeable when people come into my room.”

“But why?”

“I don’t like people watching me play.”

“Barry’s pretty good, but he’s real big on letting no one listen in. He always stops when he realizes I’m there.” She gets in closer to Lucretia but only lowers her voice a little bit and Barry can definitely still hear her. “Don’t tell him I said anything but I definitely sit outside his door when he’s playing sometimes just so I can actually listen.”

That knowledge doesn’t immediately kick his anxiety up. It’s kind of sweet, actually. The fact that she knows he hates being watched so she sits outside so he won’t know. It does make him a little more wary about playing now that he knows it can be heard from outside his door. A silencing spell maybe? But then Lup wouldn’t get to listen in, and he doesn’t mind her hearing him.

“I think… if you didn’t mind of course, I think more music would be good. From either of you. Anyone. There’s a lot of empty sound on The Starblaster sometimes and the piano or the violin would make it a little better. Especially when someone’s gone.”

 

Merle’s gone again, back into the parley. It’s not long for him, but it weighs on the rest of them, him being gone for a year only to come back for a few minutes and then disappear again.

Lup’s looking at him, wondering what he’ll say, and he sighs. “If we find another piano to put in the common space then fine. A violin is portable, a piano is not, and I like keeping that one in my room.”

Both of their faces light up, the corner of Lup’s lip quirking up, and he never could have said no. There’s a little bit of outrage out of Magnus and Taako from not being told that he played piano once they do find another one, but it doesn’t last long. Magnus sits down exactly once and tries to learn and gives up pretty much immediately. The piano is confusing and training your hands to spread out like that is difficult, so Barry doesn’t blame him.

Barry’s been toying with the idea that maybe his love for Lup isn’t all that one sided when she kisses him for the first time in cycle thirty nine. They’re in the lab and Taako has long since left the area, tired of their “incessant flirting,” as he’d called it. There’s a lot of new information that they get from Merle each time he comes back, but watching him literally fade away year after year is rough. They’re trying to work out the logistics of the inside of the Hunger, how it stays together, how it consumes.

“Barry,” Lup says, and he can hear how tired she is. “You bored?”

“Mhm,” he says absently, scribbling out the latest note. It’s wrong, he knows it is, so it doesn’t need to be there anymore, clogging up space.

“You wanna do something stupid?”

“Microwave the Light stupid or something else stupid?” Him and Magnus had done that a few years ago, and Davenport still hasn’t lifted microwave restriction from them. Dying had been worth it to watch it explode and implode back into itself.

“Something else stupid.” She wheels her chair up closer to his and gets in close. “You know the middle aged nerd thing you’ve got going on is kinda hot, right?”

It takes him a full minute and a half to process what she’d said, and when he does he drops his pen. “What?”

“I mean, I know Taako says a lot of bullshit, but I’m pretty sure he’s not wrong about our ‘incessant flirting’ with each other. It’s a little endearing, actually, you playing the long game and making zero moves while pining helplessly?”

He’s pretty sure he’s stopped breathing as he turns to stare at her, open mouthed and helpless. She furrows her brow at him and then surprise pops onto her face.

“You thought I didn’t notice?”

Vaguely he feels himself shake his head. She looks a little less confident now, ears a little droopier.

“Well that’s, hmm, that’s cool. I thought you knew. I thought we’d just been playing keep away the whole time.”

“Keep away?” he asks, voice hoarse.

“Yeah, like ‘oh you can’t have me,’ or ‘can’t make a move yet,’ keep away.”

“I was definitely not in on keep away.”

She shoves her hair back, shaved on one side and shoulder length on the other. He watches the motion and then re-meets her eyes. She’s got a small smile on her face.

“Well, I for sure noticed you pining, babe.” She leans in close and his breath hitches. “Whatcha gonna do now that your big secrets out?”

He just stares at her, eyes flicking down to her lips for a brief second and her smile gets bigger. One of her hands comes up and presses against his cheek, the other one settling on top of his knee and she leans out of her chair.

“Is this alright?”

He makes a noise of assent and she touches their lips together. It’s been a long time since he’s done this with anyone. He knows his crewmates occasionally get together with someone in a plane they land in, but he’s not the best with putting himself out there and he’s had eyes for Lup too long to let himself get down there and have fun.

The kiss itself is nothing special, and she pulls back after a moment. She hums and that smile is back as she tips back into her chair. He shakes himself out of whatever frozen state he’s been in.

“That was, uh,” he tries, fishing for words.

“Not terrible,” she finishes, spinning back across the room to her work area. “Some more practice and it could be great.”

He nods and she snickers out a laugh. “You don’t gotta be so serious, Bluejeans. It’s just a little kissing between friends.” She adds a wink onto friends and he can feel the flush on the back of his neck.

They don’t kiss again for about a month and a half, and then they’re alone in the lab again and he’s frustrated up to the ceiling with how they’re trying to work around the Light and the Hunger, and how nothing is working and Merle isn’t even there for him to bounce clerical ideas off of because he’s off playing shirtless chess with the Hunger’s creator and having a great time. He’s got his hands in his hair and his head on the desk when Lup’s hand rests on his shoulder and she pulls him back up into a sitting position.

The kissing feels a lot more natural then than it did the first time. He actually touches her this time, fitting a hand on her shoulder and closing his eyes. It feels good, less awkward than before.

And they stay like that for a while, very good friends that occasionally kiss one another and practice music together and end up laughing at things that aren’t really funny well into the night. Until they reach the Legato and have to decide what they’re going to present to make themselves worthy of the Light.

“You could bring someone back from the dead?” She supplies in the dead of night, draped overtop of him in his room. They’d ended up there for no reason. Lup had brought her violin but no one had ended up playing anything.

“Eh, too risky. Necromancy in practice is actually kinda shitty, to families and the actual dead and all that.”

“True,” she says. “Also I don’t think they’d like it that much.”

“You could, uhh, make a massive fireball?”

“Alright, are we just giving bad ideas based on our magic classes now? Nice, cool and nice.”

“I really can’t think of anything. There’s nothing I can do that’s really good enough to showcase. And maybe I could take a class? But even then.”

She’s staring off into the middle distance, twisting her lips in thought. “We could do a joint thing,” she says quietly.

“A joint thing.”

“Together. Preform something together.”

“Preform? What are you talking about?”

“We could play a duet?”

And then he realizes she not staring into the middle distance at all, she’s staring at his piano. That has her violin resting on top of it.

“…Lup.”

“I know you hate playing in front of people, but you’re good at it. Really good. You’ve gotten a lot better than when you first brought that thing on here. And I love playing the violin with you. It’s so much fun, Barry. And I never feel bad if I flub up a note. We would totally rock their socks off playing together.”

“What would we play?”

“We could make a song?”

“Nope,” he says. “Definitely not. Neither of us are composers and I’m not playing something that sounds nasty to anyone but us to get access to the Light.”

“Come on,” she whines, rolling more on top of him. “It wouldn’t sound nasty. You’re a romantic, right? We could make it all about our _feelings_. Mushy stuff that we’re never gonna say out loud because you’re a sap but you’re an anxious sap and I hate talking about shit.”

He wonders not for the first time just how deep into this they are. He knows they’re more than just the very good friends who kiss and hang out all the time that they claim to be. He knows Lup hates talking about anything deep and emotional, but sometimes she lets her guard down just enough to show him she cares about him in a more than platonic kissing way. Sometimes she says things to him in elvish that he can’t understand but can feel their meaning by the tone she says them with.

“Alright,” he says instead of asking, because that’s who they are right now. They won’t ask, not yet. “But it has to sound good. I need it to make people feel something with the way it sounds.”

“’Course,” she says pressing her lips to his, “but we can start hashing out the details in the morning. Right now it’s sleepy time.”

She’s slept in his room before. It’s a more often than not thing at this point. He knows Taako thinks there’s much more going on, but there really isn’t. She pulls him down in next to her, denies his protests of wanting to get more brainstorming or work in, and ends up with her head pressed against his shoulder and an arm over his stomach.

In the morning they’ll work on finding what notes fit together, what sounds sound bad with each other, and how the piano and violin fit together perfectly. It’s a year long thing, making that song, and they definitely get frustrated with each other, but it happens. Barry pours his soul into his part, all the love he’s been feeling for forty seven years splashing into the keys and out into the air. He can tell Lup does too, the rise and fall off the notes coming from her violin.

When they’re almost out of time, a week or so away from needing it perfect to show hopefully the whole planar system, he barely needs to focus on what notes he’s playing. It’s not something he’s tired of, which he’s grateful for. Lup’s eyes stay half lidded the whole time she plays, staring down at the fingerboard. He glances at her sometimes, in the middle of playing, at the way she’s got her hair cut close to her jaw this year, the ends of it a deep pink fading up into a rose color near the top of her head before stopping abruptly into the dark color of her roots. How she sways with the music, getting deep into it. The way her fingers flick across the strings as she changes notes. He’s so far head over heels in love with her, and he hopes she gets it from the way he’s playing.

The day comes, and the others display their offerings, and Barry’s so happy and so relieved when Magnus’s duck gets rebroadcast. He knows how much he’d been worrying about the duck and whether or not it would be accepted. But him going up also means it’s time for him and Lup. Lup is wearing this dress that hangs off her in every flattering way imaginable with the top half of her hair pulled back with gold looking beads. He was wearing pants that weren’t jeans, an actual nice looking suit with a tie that matched the color of her dress, but Lup had taken one look at him and sent him back to his room to put on jeans instead of dress pants.

“If you don’t wear jeans I’m gonna lose it, I swear. Your last name is Bluejeans, I don’t care if it’s not legal. Bad luck to change your brand.”

He can feel how nervous she is as they walk onstage, taking their places respectively near each other. Her shoulders are tense and she brushes part of her hair back with a shaky hand, but when they start playing she’s completely steady.

And then it’s over, almost like they’d never played it at all, and then they hear it loud and clear in their heads, and everyone hears it again, each note, and they stand there, laughing, hands up, grasping at each other.

“Barry, do you wanna go somewhere and talk for a while?”

And Barry would love nothing more, so he answers with a very enthusiastic “yeah,” that Lup smiles brightly at as she drags him down off the stage and past the Conservatory. They end up near old empty buildings, fitting themselves under an archway. They’re still holding hands. He wonders briefly if she’s uncomfortable with how damp his hand is, but the thought leaves his head because she’s looking at him the way he knows he’s looked at her for so long, and he can’t help himself as he pushes forward and kisses her, pressing her back gently against the stone.

She kisses him back for a while, hands gripping at his hair, until she pulls him back. “Not that I don’t enjoy your enthusiasm, because I _definitely_ do, but we actually gotta talk.”

“I love you,” he says.

“Well that’s a start,” she says fiddling with her bracelet. She lets out a breath. “I love you too, you jeans wearing nerd. Gods, Taako’s never gonna let me live this one down.”

He can feel his heart swelling up under his ribs and the grin splitting his face. He knew, logically, that she felt something back, but she loves him, she _loves_ him. He feels giddy, like a little kid.

“Oh my fuckin- you sap,” she pushes his face back, looking off to the side with her own smile. “Was it not obvious?”

“I mean, I knew,” he says, straightening his glasses from her hand. “But hearing you say it is just… nice.”

“Ditto,” Lup says, and her eyes are soft as she looks down at him, still a good head taller than him. “I know I’m bad at saying things like this, but you mean so much to me and I hope you know that. It’s not as difficult with you. You are something special, Barry Bluejeans.”

“I… Lup I’ve loved you for a long, long time. And saying it is something that is never going to get old. I really hope you aren’t going to get tired of me telling you how incredible you are all the time because for me it’s something novel and amazing and I love you.”

“You really are a romantic,” she says before leaning down and kissing him.

When they pull back, Barry says, “Calling this dating feels very high school.”

“Technically we aren’t dating unless we call it that.” Lup brushes her hair back again. “We’ve been ‘together’ for a while now, but you don’t have to call it something, Barry. The others know something’s up, Taako especially. But if we just wanna be in love with each other we don’t have to tack a word on it for their brain’s sake.”

“You’re- yeah, you’re right. You’re right. Gods I love you.”

“I feel like the others won’t be back at the ship for a while,” Lup says in a low voice. “We’d probably get the place to ourselves for the night.”

“You think so?”

“Mhm, everyone’ll be too busy partying their asses off to come back and check on how we’re doing.”

“Is this an invitation or a request?”

“Barold, would you mind terribly if I came to your room tonight?”

“I don’t think I would at all.” And he bends down and swings her up into his arms princess style. She wasn’t expecting it at all, if the yelp she makes and the way her ears flick back are anything to go by. And then she starts laughing so hard he almost drops her.

“So bold,” she says while looping her arms around his neck. “You gonna stay this bold all night?”

“If you’d let me.”

“Ohoho, babe we’re gonna have fun.”

The Starblaster is very deserted when they get to it and Barry’s very close to dropping Lup because they were farther away than he thought and his arms are not that strong. She’s offered to walk and he’s refused, arms slipping lower every second.

“You’re like bent over Barry, let me walk.”

“We are almost there. This is a _romantic gesture_ , Lup, it’s part of the wooing.”

“The- the _wooing_? I’m wooed, babe. You successfully wooed me like ten years ago.”

“This is the first time we’ve acknowledged it or talked about it out loud at all,” he hisses out, hoisting her back up.

Lup’s quiet at that and he manages to make it the rest of the way to the ship without dropping her. She hops out of his arms once they make it inside, disregarding the fact that they aren’t in either of their rooms. He’s a little grateful, he’s not sure he could’ve kept his balance going down stairs.

“You’re not…” she starts without finishing. He looks at her and she doesn’t look right at him. “You’re not upset that it took this long, are you?”

“What?” He feels his brow furrow and he dips his head into her line of sight. “No, not at all, where did you get that from?”

“Just… I don’t know, you keep talking about how long this has been a thing and how big the buildup has been and I wanna make sure you’re not disappointed.”

“I’m not,” he says gently. “I promise. We don’t have to be ‘officially together’ for me to have enjoyed being with you. Even before you kissed me in the lab I was fine with how we were. I would have been fine if we never got together at all and just stayed vaguely flirty friends. I mean don’t get me wrong, this is the dream situation, but I don’t mind how long it took. We’re here for the foreseeable future. Forty seven years could look like a blink in the span of things. It certainly feels like one right now. I love you, and you love me, and us not doing anything about it for so long isn’t bad, Lup. It’s just how we’ve taken things. And I’m very, very okay with that.”

“Ugh, you fucking sap,” she says, pushing at her eyes. “Alright, you gonna finishing wooing me into your bedroom for some extra fun R rated adult activities or what?”

He doesn’t scoop her up again, but he definitely can’t keep his hands off of her as they make their way to his bedroom.

In the morning, she wraps her arms around him and practically hangs off him as they make their way up to the kitchen for some coffee. It’s just Merle and Taako in there right now.

Taako takes one look at them, Lup’s smudged up makeup and half undone hair and Barry’s more than sleep tousled hair and the dark marks on both of their necks and holds his hand up for a high five. Lup gives him one first, and when Taako doesn’t put his hand down, Barry gives him one as well.

“’Do you wanna go somewhere and talk for a while?’” Merle says mockingly. “Glad to know the new definition of ‘talk.’”

“You’re just jealous you didn’t get any of this hot ass last night,” Lup says as she pinches his butt, and he very much does not jump, but he laughs.

“Nope,” Merle says, making a face. “Not my type.”

“We all know you _love_ plants, grandpa,” Taako says, sliding each of them a mug of coffee.

Lucretia walks in next and sits down next to Merle, looking at the two of them. She gives a quiet thumbs up. Davenport comes in after her, grabbing a mug of coffee from Taako before sliding into an empty seat. He looks at Lup and Barry and takes a sip of coffee.

“It looks like your… talk went well last night.”

“Oh it went very good, Cap’n’port,” Lup purrs from her place resting on his shoulder.

“Did Lup and Barry finally fuck?” Magnus asks as he comes in. Lup lets go of Barry with one hand to chuck the muffin that Taako hands her straight at his head. He catches it easily and takes a bit out of it, grinning. “I’m gonna take that as a yes.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full of food, nasty,” Taako says as he hands Lup another muffin, this time for eating.

“But then I wouldn’t get to gross you out.”

“That’s the point,” he says, offering Barry a muffin that he takes gladly. A fruit similar to apples are in these, and the crunchy give is good.

“To be fair, we did actually talk for part of the night,” Barry says. “It just wasn’t the whole night.”

Lup makes a gleeful noise in his ear, and Davenport groans. He tries dutifully to change the subject. “Everyone’s works were very good yesterday. I’m proud of everyone for succeeding.”

“The difference between try and triumph is just a little umph! Taako patented right there.”

“That’s fantasy Marvin Phillips,” Merle says.

“Well now it’s forever Taako’s property, through every plane of existence ever. Also it’s in a book! How many of you bought the book? One of you had to. Support local authors.”

“Why buy the book when I’ve got the real thing as my brother?”

“Because you love me, Lulu. And because you gotta keep a copy for the records.”

“I’ve got a copy but it didn’t buy it,” Lucretia says. She doesn’t elaborate and Barry wonders who exactly she stole it from just to tick off Taako.

“Wha- you stole a copy, didn’t you? When and where from? I gotta know, Lucy.”

“I took it from the first batch you made,” she says, taking a drink of her coffee. “Figured first edition might sell more in the future.”

“Sneaky,” he says, throwing her a muffin too. “I like it.”

Days later, when they realize that the Legato’s Light of Creation isn’t their Light of Creation, but is instead a family of memory altering jellyfish, Barry will mourn the idea of the Legato and how open they were to them.

When Magnus and Lucretia come sprinting onboard the Starblaster with the smallest one of those jellyfish, he hopes to every god out there that it doesn’t disappear like the people they’ve tried to save before.

It survives, it lives, and Magnus names it Fisher.

Lup and him are laying in his bed, exploring each other’s bodies in the least sexual way imaginable by going through all the injuries scarred onto their bodies before they got stuck like this.

“This one?” She asks, poking at the mark under his eyebrow.

“Oh, I passed out at my job in the coffee shop on campus once and hit my head on the counter.”

“You worked at the coffee shop?”

“Mhm. It was a terrible place to work, but the people were good.”

“Why’d you pass out?”

“My schedule for the day got all switched up and I forgot to eat because of it. I carried a bunch of milk in from a delivery and ran back up to the front counter and my body decided that that was enough for the day.”

She snorts and rolls her head so she’s staring at the ceiling. He looks at her, trying to find something to ask about. He thinks they’ve pretty much exhausted ones that are visible with clothes on.

And then he sees a raised line of skin, lighter than the rest, curling right at the place where the lobe of her ear meets her head. He brushes a finger over it and she shivers, ear flicking at the touch.

“What’s this one from?”

She’s quiet for a second, still staring upward. “Elf ears sold a lot on the black market.”

His hand recoils and her lips perk up. “Little too dark for you, Bluejeans?”

“No I… I’m sorry. That that… what happened?”

“We were in a caravan,” she starts, pulling his hand back with hers. “They weren’t good, but they let us travel with them if we cooked. Neither of us knew all that much magic yet, definitely not defensive magic. We were light sleepers, but I guess not light enough? This guy thought it would be a good idea to drag me off into the woods at night to get some parts to sell, I don’t even know what he would’ve done with Taako. But he threatened him, told me something very very bad would happened to him if I yelled, so I kept quiet. I don’t actually remember how old we were then, but we were young.”

She takes a breath and lets it out harshly. “I don’t actually, uh, it’s really fuzzy after that. I know there was a knife and I think I kicked him? Or Taako kicked him, later. There was a lot of blood, but I- it’s not really—,” she swallows thickly and scrunches up her eyes for a second. “Taako knocked him out with our frying pan. I guess he woke up? We left after that.”

Barry doesn’t touch her other than the hand she’s got clasped tightly in her own. He rubs his thumb over the skin of her hand until her grip loosens.

“Sorry,” she says, and she sounds frustrated with herself. “Fuck, sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Lup.”

She rolls onto her side and looks at him. He tentatively slides a hand up to cup her cheek and she leans into it.

“Do you not want me to touch your ears?”

She smiles and the tension drops. “Nah, you’re fine if you want to. Pretty sure no one here’s got any want to chop these babies off. It was a long time ago, Barry. I just haven’t thought about it in depth in a while.”

Lup tugs at his shirt and he slips it off, lying back town. She does the same, and the bra she’s wearing is really just customary. It’s not like he hasn’t seen her naked before, and her him.

“My turn,” she says, poking a finger at his chest. “I’ve always wondered why you went the hard way around and didn’t just transition with transmutation magic.”

“Oh,” he says, looking down. He’d only ever done the top surgery, not all that interested in the rest of it. “It’s weird. When I was younger I didn’t like using magic for things I didn’t have to, even though I was a wizard. If I could heal small scrapes or cuts on my own over time, I didn’t go out of my way to get any healing magic. Spells can be undone. Technically surgical body modification can be undone with magic, but it’s less likely. Plus I liked the idea of the scars becoming a part of my body. Like ‘look what I did.’ It’s kinda stupid.”

“Nah,” she says. “It’s kinda cool. I’d never think of it like that.”

“You did magic, right?”

“Yup. Taako spent a lot of time making sure nothing would go wrong before he even considered doing it.”

“Taako did it?”

“He’s the only one I trusted to. Letting some stranger have all the power over how they’re going to change my body was a fucking terrifying idea. I knew Taako would make me how I wanted, we’d talked about what I’d wanted. I didn’t want to be different from him, you know? So much of us being us was being identical, regardless of if I identified as a girl or not. I didn’t want that to change. Someone else might have tried to, I don’t know, make me look less elvenly androgynous? I liked the way I looked, I _like_ the way I look. Changing that would’ve made me hate it.”

Lup has more scars than he does by a long shot. Most of them are older and faded, almost unnoticeable at this point. He hesitates to ask lest he make her relive bad memories like he did with the one under her ear.

“You’ve got a tattoo,” she says, relieving him of next question duty.

“I do,” he says sourly.

“That’s, uh, necromantic shit, right? I never studied it.”

“It is necromantic shit, but it’s also bullshit. Which I didn’t know when I got it. Like, the sigil itself is fine and whatever. But the guy who made it? His research is all kinds of thrown together bad.”

“Oh babe,” and she sounds so amused. “When did you get it?”

“When I was twenty,” he says, looking down at the sigil inked into his arm forever. “I thought it was a good idea because I’d figured out a major I actually liked but then I did actual research into my field a few years later and figured out all his stuff was wholly untested. He’s been renounced from necromantic teachings.”

“Oh _babe_ ,” she says, and he doesn’t need to look at her to know she’s smiling. “That’s a fucking tragedy.”

He sighs and looks over her. There’s one on her hip that he’s noticed before, shiny and discolored. A burn mark. It starts at the top of her hip and goes partway down her leg, not that he can see most of it with her covering it up with her pants. She notices him staring and laughs.

“Oh that one. I fireballed myself in the hip when I was first getting started in evocation. The spell backfired and hit me pretty hard. I couldn’t sleep on my side for weeks.”

He rests a hand there on her hip, rubs his thumb over the scarred skin. They stay like that for a while. Lup doesn’t ask about any other parts of him, probably knows where the rest came from already.

“Hey,” he says into the quiet. “You don’t have to answer everything I ask you know. If something ever makes you uncomfortable to think about you can just tell me you don’t want to.”

“Barry, babe, I promise you I’m fine. You can ask whatever you want and I’ll tell you. But sometimes it’s rough and difficult to think about but I want you to know. I do. I want you to know anything and everything I can tell you. That includes the good shit and the real fucked up shit. It’s a pretty even mix. And if you ever want to know I’ll tell you.”

“Just know you don’t have to, alright? I know you want me to know, but sometimes reliving stuff isn’t good for you. And if it makes you uncomfortable to tell me then I don’t want you to. Not because I don’t want to know, but because I don’t want you to hurt.”

“You’re sweet,” she says and she kisses him. “I’ll make sure I know my options next time I tell you something from my childhood.”

Barry and Lup are away from the Starblaster and when they come back and drop into Barry’s room, Taako is there.

Along with all of Taako’s stuff.

All of Barry’s is gone.

“Uh,” he says, looking around. This definitely hadn’t been done this morning. “What happened?”

“I’ve accosted your room, Barold. All your stuff is in mine and Lup’s old dig.”

“…Why?”

Taako rolls his eyes and motions to the two of them. “Uh, Lup’s never in our room but all her stuff is. I didn’t wanna move her stuff here, so I switched us.”

“Aw, bro, that’s real sweet.”

“It’s practical is what it is you nasty. Get your head on straight, now you’ve got the space.”

And Barry realizes that Taako’s doing them a favor. Sort of. They don’t exactly need the space, but it’ll be nice to have it. It’s not like Taako’s sizing down his living quarters all that much either, but he did do it, and if his body language says anything it’s saying he’s embarrassed about the attention on this act.

“Thanks Taako,” he says, sliding back out of his, no Taako’s now, room. Lup follows him out after a second, and it feels very weird to be walking the opposite direction down this hallway to get to his room after fifty some years.

It’s set up pretty much the same. The bed is bigger, somehow, and he wonders if he just cast a modified enlarge on his bed. The piano is in the corner, violin resting on top. All his clothing is set up in the dresser and he wonders how long this took Taako and if he did it himself or enlisted some help.

“He really moved us,” Lup says, flopping back onto the bed. “That nerd. I can’t believe it.”

“It’s really nice of him,” he says, sitting down and plunking out something on the piano. It’s idle music, something he’s not really paying attention to.

Lup doesn’t say anything but she hums out in agreement. After a while she says, “You’re playing our song.”

He hadn’t noticed. It’s unsurprising. They worked on it every day that year, adjusting the way their sounds fit together. “It’s a good song.”

“Yeah,” she says, humming her part instead of getting up to get her violin. “It is.”

The cycles are good for a while. They get the Light, or they try their hardest, and Barry starts thinking that he needs to have a failsafe in place for when they die. Or a way to nullify the death faster. He wants to be able to help, not be useless and dead all the time. He’d be going deep into necromantic theory to find an answer, and he’d like to do it with Lup if he ends up digging through old forbidden magic books.

And then cycle sixty five rolls around and they’re read their sins by judges who claim to know their stories, and for crimes that haven’t even come to pass they’re killed.

Lucretia all but collapses when they all reform, holding her head in her hands and muttering to herself. He catches snippets of being tracked down and her last saying of “I fucking made it.”

Davenport touches her shoulder first and she jumps, smacking him back and away from her and grabbing for her wand. And then she stills her shaking hands and looks at him, really looks at him. And she reaches out and touches him and something raw flashes over her face before she pulls herself up.

Barry doesn’t know what to do. Everyone is silent, unsure of what to say. It’s never been just one of them before, never just one. And never just one for an entire year.

“Hey Cretia,” Lup says first, shaking the heaviness off. “What should we make for our first night in a new year? You get to pick and you get to help, if you want. I’m sure you want something fancy.”

“Something sugary,” she croaks out, clutching at her midsection. “Chocolate? Cake maybe?”

“Hell yeah.” Lup walks over next to her and discreetly offers her an arm to hold if she wants it. When Lucretia doesn’t take it she doesn’t push. “We’re gonna make the best fucking chocolate cake in the all the gods damned universes.”

The crew follows them into the kitchen and Lup and Taako work together with Lucretia, handing her bowls to mix. Barry sits on an empty counter and wonders exactly what Lucretia went through.

“Hey babe,” comes from Lup, and he looks up to find her holding out a spoon with what looks like frosting on it. “Taste?”

Lucretia looks at him anxiously from behind her shoulder and he takes the spoon and eats it. They don’t use the chocolate often, saving it for special occasions. This is a special occasion if he’s ever heard of one. The frosting is amazing, smooth and flavorful.

“It’s really good you guys.”

Taako’s leaning his weight on the counter they’re at, looking at Lucretia. She relaxes minutely, Barry notes, and turns back to the task at hand.

“See? You’re not horrible in the kitchen, Lucy. This cake is gonna be bomb as fuck.”

The cake is, in fact, bomb as fuck. They don’t eat the whole thing that night, but they come close. Lucretia is still stiff while they sit together, keeping all of her body very close to herself. She doesn’t touch anyone, glances at the door when they get loud, and scribbles in her journal.

It’s like she’s gone back to the way she was before they spent years together, but it’s so much worse now.

Barry doesn’t see her go to sleep. He’s not certain she does. Still, he falls into bed next to Lup after the day is done.

“Do you think she’ll be alright?”

“Lucretia’s strong,” Lup says. “But I think she might need some helping hands after this year.”

There’s footsteps outside their door that pause for a second before moving on. He’s not sure who it is but he can guess.

“We just gotta give her a little time to get acclimated, babe. If she needs help she’ll ask.”

Barry wraps his arms around her midsection and squeezes tight. “I hope you’re right.”

Lucretia looks no better rested in the morning, gripping at her coffee. The journal she’s been writing in looks worn, burnt at the edges, pages wavy like it’d been dumped in water. It snaps closed if anyone gets too close. She still won’t let anyone touch her.

One night he wakes up to the creaking of his door. He looks up sleepily to find Lucretia looking at them. Her eyes go wide when she sees he’s awake and she shuts the door again. Barry frowns and slips out of bed as quietly as he can. There’s no need to wake up Lup.

“Lucretia?” He calls when he’s outside of his room. She’s standing back against the wall, looking at him with fear.

“I’m sorry,” she chokes out. “Just- just checking. Making sure.”

“It’s okay,” he says, keeping his distance. She seems more skittish tonight. “Really, it’s alright. We’re all still here. No one’s going anywhere.”

She nods and gives him a shaky thumbs up. “I’ll be going.”

“If you need us, Lucretia, we’re here for you. I promise.”

He can see her swallow the lump in her throat as she nods, turning and leaving. He slips back into the room, crawling back under the covers. Lup stirs, make a sleepy questioning noise.

“It’s nothing,” he says, running a hand through her hair. “Go back to sleep.”

He finds her asleep on the bridge days later. Davenport’s there as well, sitting next to the wheel. She’s sleeping sitting up, head resting on her knees, journal on top of her legs. It’s the first time he’s seen her rest since the reset. It can’t be a comfortable position but he won’t disturb her.

Barry sits with Davenport, keeping him quiet company.

Lucretia wakes up about twenty minutes later, blinking the sleep out of her eyes. She jumps when she sees them but settles back down after catching their faces. Her bun is messy, loose hairs falling out of it, half of it knotted in place. She scrubs at her scalp and then at her eyes.

She comes to dinner that night with all of it cut off, hair sheared short. Lup claps quietly and congratulates her on finally joining the short hair club.

He doesn’t see her sleep again, running on coffee and fumes. The bags under her eyes are a little scary. He may still be tired all the time, but she looks absolutely worn down. He’s in the lab one day, him in a chair at his desk and her in one pulled into the corner.

“I want to tell you what happened,” she says out of nowhere. Barry puts down what he’s working on and turns to give her his full attention. “But I can’t make myself.”

“I could read your journal?”

She grips at the wrecked notebook for a second, eyes staring at the floor. Her breathing hitches and he backs off.

“Or not. You don’t have to tell me anything, Luce.”

“I _want_ to.” Her voice is rough and she grimaces. “If I let you read it I don’t want you asking questions until you’re done.”

“Okay,” he says, and she holds it out to him, fingers curled back so they won’t touch.

The journal is… rough. It starts out mostly coherent. He thinks she must have had a concussion while writing some of this because the words get dragged into each other and some of the choices for words are downright wrong. The ship went down and she woke up alone. Some things were broken and she’d hit her head but she was fine. She had no idea where anyone was, just her and Fisher alone together.

There’s a lot of wondering where everyone was, wondering if and when they’d be back. It hurts for him to read that because he’s pretty sure they were dead at this point.

There’s blood covering one of the pages, soaked under the words that were stopped abruptly. The date has a question mark next to it when she next writes, hand writing shaky. There had been raiders and she’d been caught off guard. She hadn’t even heard them enter the ship. There’s a mention of Fisher here, their tank getting almost broken.

When she writes about moving the ship it’s bad. Him and Davenport never trained anyone else on how to fly the ship and he knows now that it was a mistake. The officials from the judge’s city had tried to get her too many times and she’d had to move the ship too many times to get away from them and raiders and people just trying to make money off of her or the ship. It’s a lot of hiding and not a lot of sleeping.

There’s an entire five pages of her wondering if it’s bad for her to want the plane to die, if her not finding the Light is a bad thing if she just wants this year to end.

The dates stop eventually, handwriting growing more and more frantic, experiences blurring into one another. She dreamt the year was over only to wake up with a knife at her throat. She can’t take time to sleep. She can’t take time to eat. She’s glad Barry helped her practice her magic because it’s been the most useful this year.

There’s an entry near the end of the year, the last entry before the reset. _I don’t think I’m going to make it. Maybe it’d be better to die with this plane. Everyone’s counting on me, though. I think Fisher’s worried. I can’t_

_I can’t_

_Please_

The end of the page is a mess of scribbled over words that he can’t read and the page is crumpled up and ripped in the inner corner like she’d almost ripped it out.

He takes a deep breath before turning the page, heart in his throat. His eyes are watery but he’s not crying yet.

The writing is neat and dated now, but he can see where her hands shook. She’s back to wondering if it makes her a bad person that she’s delighted that that plane got destroyed. There’s a lot of how she’s tired of people walking on eggshells around her but how can she be tired of it if they’re right for doing it? If she wants to scream every time someone makes a loud noise around her does it make them right? She wants a hug but she’s scared. If she starts sobbing on them they’ll be disgusted. But she hasn’t been touched in a year after being around constant affection from her family and she’s terrified.

_They died. I was right, they died. But… but what if they just told me that? They wouldn’t have left. Right? Not for a year. That’s a shitty goof. I can’t ask that. They died. Of course they died. They all died together, frozen into solid rock because of their sins and for crimes they didn’t do. They died? I still can’t sleep._

“We died, Lucretia.” That’s the latest entry. “We wouldn’t do that to you. Never.”

She bites at her fingers and stares at the far wall. He puts the journal down and gets up. She closes her eyes and won’t look at him.

“Luce, we wouldn’t pretend we died for a year when we didn’t just for a goof. We died. I promise. You’re… you’re not okay and you don’t have to keep pretending you are.”

She opens her eyes and looks at him. That raw look is back and she reaches a hand out tentatively before pulling it back.

“Can I…”

He pulls her into a hug and she squeaks, body stiffening up against him. But then she relaxes, head fitting on his shoulder arms wrapping around his midsection. She’s still half in the chair. Her body starts shaking before the crying starts, but he holds her that much closer when she starts to sob. It’s loud and gasping and he can feel the wetness seep into his shirt as she grips him closer. One of his hands pets down the back of her head and she wails. He sinks down to the floor, pulling her fully from the chair, and she curls up on top of him, legs pulled in, head still smushed against him.

She starts apologizing and he shushes her, hand rubbing down her back. She cries for a long time, breaths catching as she lets everything from the last year out. Davenport pokes his head through the door at one point, checking in on what’s happening. He leaves very quietly after catching sight of them, Lucretia wrapped up in Barry’s arms as small as she can make herself. He wonders if the others are out there, wonder what’s happening in the usually calm lab room.

She cries so hard she falls asleep when it finally stops. He doesn’t let her go. Instead he hoists her up in his arms gently and shoulders his way out of the room. The team is there, waiting in the hallway for him to come out.

“Cuddle pile,” he says, looking pointedly at Magnus.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“She needs it,” is all he says. Magnus takes initiative, running around and grabbing blankets and pillows from the rooms and piling it all up in the common room.

“Make sure she can get out if she wants,” Davenport says, settling in next to Merle and Taako. Barry lays his head on Lup’s stomach, legs getting tangled up with someone else. Lucretia stays wrapped up in his arms and Magnus holds what he can’t.

She wakes up eventually to their quiet talking, jolting awake and sitting upright. Magnus and Barry let her go immediately. She looks around, down at Barry, at the rest of them, and lays back down.

“Sorry,” she breathes out, rolling into something more comfortable. Lup offers her a hand and she takes it, squeezing.

“You’re good, Lucy,” she says, other hand brushing through Barry’s hair. “You just get some of that well needed sleep and we’ll be good.”

Lucretia nods and lets her breathing even back out.

She’s still jumpy, but a little less so. Way more open to others touching her now and talking with the group again. She hates staying cooped up in the ship, asserts herself and makes them take her with them down to the surface and on search missions. Not that they would ever say no.

Lucretia is different, though. She carries herself different, Barry thinks. A little straighter, a harder set to her shoulders. Responsibility. Her magic is a little more refined now, more defensive. It comes to her faster. If she’s under pressure it doesn’t fizzle out or work halfway. It’s strong from the get go.

The Hunger, or John as Merle calls it, is only getting stronger. Barry doesn’t like him going back there year after year. Playing shirtless chess with their enemy. The last time he Parleys Merle doesn’t really talk about it for a few days.

“It got made from a discontentment from life. I’m not going back.”

They’ve gotten all the information out of John that they can, and Barry’s back to the drawing board on how to make them stronger. He’s got an idea wiggling around in the back of his head, but it’s dangerous, incredibly so. Lup would be for it, he’s sure, but that makes it all the more terrifying.

“I have an idea,” he pitches one day when it’s just him and Lup. “It’s to fight the Hunger, but it’s really, really dangerous.”

“I love dangerous,” she say, throwing a pen up and down. “Lay it on me.”

“We keep dying, and we’re pretty much useless once we’re dead for the year, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“If we became… undead, then when we died we wouldn’t be dead.”

“Yeah, but if we get all working brained zombified it’ll just take all that away the next year when we reset.”

“Not if it’s something to do with our souls.”

She looks at him, tilting her head. “What do you mean?”

“When we reset, we don’t lose out memories. It’s only our bodies that get reset. By that logic, our souls should work like our memories. They retain what we’ve done to them over the year, not resetting when the cycle restarts.”

“And how would we go about making our souls undead, necromancy boy?”

“I… I said this was dangerous and I meant it. If we, maybe, became liches, then it should keep with our souls.”

Her mouth drops open for a second before she clacks it shut. Her lips purse and she crosses her arms, thinking. “That’s a risky fuckin’ idea, babe.”

“I know.”

“Like, rip our souls apart for good kinda risky.”

“I know,” he says again. “But we’re no use to anyone if we’re dead for a year, and liches can harness so much power. I wouldn’t even bring it up if I could think of any other way for us to do this.”

“I’ll think on it,” she says. “It’d be a lot of planning and fail safes.”

“More than we’d need,” he assures her. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“Think about yourself for a second here too, Barold. I don’t wanna watch your soul tear itself apart because we did the undead thing wrong. Dunno how that would feel but I’m pretty sure it’s not great.”

“I don’t want anything bad happening to either of us. If this works we won’t have to be apart when one of us dies. We’ll be stronger and be able to wreck some more house on the Hunger when it shows up.”

She smiles. “You know how much I love wrecking house.”

“Just think about it. If you don’t want to we won’t and I won’t bring it up again. Really. I trust your judgement on this.”

“I mean, you’re the one with two degrees in necromancy. If anyone’s gonna have the better ideas on this it’s you.”

“It’s not just me. It’s both of us. Unless you’re completely onboard, we’re not doing it.”

“Alright babe,” she says, grabbing his hand in hers. “I do hate being split up for a year when one of us dies. We’d be able to stick around for each other with this, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll spend some time weighing the pros and cons, but if you think we could do it safely I’m probably gonna be down for it.”

He doesn’t bring it back up until she does a few days later, agreeing to research it with him, a tentative yes that will turn into a whole hearted one after their research. They need memories, feelings to cling to to keep their souls intact. Something clear in the forefront of their brains.

“I need Taako to know,” Lup says. “I can’t do this without him knowing. He has to be a part of my memories.”

“You don’t- you don’t lose your memories, Lup.”

“I mean the ones keeping us _us_. If… If he could be there, when we do it, I’d like that.”

“Yeah, yeah he can be there. Of course he can be there. Do you think he’ll be okay with it?”

“Fuck no. God, he’s gonna kill me if we fuck this up. But he won’t stop us.”

“The others can’t know until it’s done.”

She nods. “Yeah, Davenport’d lose what little shit he’s got left. Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, that’s what they say isn’t it?”

“I think once it’s done it’s done and they’ll get over it.”

“Ohoho, getting frisky.”

“We’re no closer to finishing this thing off than we were at the beginning. If this- if this gets us any closer it’ll be monumental.”

“Hey, come on.” She’s frowning at him. “Don’t get like that. We’ve learned a lot, Mr. Cynical. The light’s got that craveability that Voreman Johnson up there in the shitty black world eating mass just can’t resist. We know what it is, we know what it wants, we know what’s happening. We’re not blind anymore, Barry. And this is just one big step forward.”

“Yeah,” he scrubs at his face, displacing his glasses. “Yeah, fuck I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m _tired_ , Lup.”

She wraps her arms around his middle, pressing her front up against his back. “Yeah,” she says quietly next to his ear. “Me too.”

Taako kicks Merle out of his own greenhouse to drag Barry in to talk to him, much to Merle’s dismay.

“Atmospheric,” he says before Barry can ask about the location. “Makes this sound less threatening.”

“…Threatening?”

“Listen.” He twirls his wand around in his hands. “I get what you two are doing, and I get that I can’t stop you or her from making this dumb fuck decision, but shit Barry did you have to choose the worst necromantic practice to try out on my sister?”

“This—”

“Will make you stronger, I know. She told me. You can be sure of that. I get it. Really, my dude, I get it. But if either of your souls get fucked up, you better believe I’m unfucking up yours just so I can fuck it back up worse. We could lose you both permanently.”

It doesn’t take him long to catch the anxiety written all over his voice. “We’ll be fine,” he says instead of mentioning that Taako definitely just said he cares about him in his own roundabout way. “I promise you, this is going to go fine. You’ll be there. You’ll see.”

“Of course I’ll be there, idiot. Gotta supervise, make sure you don’t so anything more nefarious with your souls than ripping them out and apart and then putting them back together again and back into your dead fucking bodies. Dunno what you could do that’s worse than that, but I can’t let it happen!”

Barry holds his arms out, and while Taako scoffs, he does accept the hug. It’s better to offer first than go straight into the affection with him.

“We’ll be fine,” he says quietly. “And in the very, very off chance that we’re not, you have my full permission to fuck me up.”

“Natch,” he says back, squeezing him lightly. “Alright, belated really weird shovel talk over. Go fuckin’, I dunno, pick your forever death outfit.”

When the day comes and they walk out to that hill, Taako makes a comment on their clothes. “Little gauche, yeah? The- the red robes and that.”

Lup pulls him in for a tight hug. “We’re gonna be fine, bro bro. We’ll be back to normal in no time.”

“Y’know, you say that, but you can’t really be sure, yeah?”

“Remember, full permission to kick my whole ass if something goes wrong.”

“I’m holding you to that.” Taako is not looking good. He looks like he’s going to throw up, actually, and Barry hugs him once Lup lets him go. “If this fucks up, _I’m_ going to have to explain everything, and I’m looking forward to you two explaining to Cap’n’port why you ripped your souls in half.”

He stays there at the bottom of the hill they’re doing the ritual on. Mumbles something about not interfering with his ‘Spooky death magic.’ Achieving lichdom without making pacts with demons is difficult, was difficult to find information on. He has the components spread out, sigils painted onto both of their bodies, and they read the incantation together in steady, overlapping voices.

The sensation of his soul being ripped from his body both feels like it lasts forever and for no time at all. There’s so much energy everywhere, coming from his core. It’s painful in a sharp dizzying sort of way. He’s not sure how long he’s like that, soul ripping itself into tiny pieces of crackling arcane energy, but when it settles he feels almost hollow. It’s disorienting. Every sensation feels muted, and features of his body he knows should exist just don’t. His sight catches Taako and he does the only thing he can think of, nodding, before sinking back into his body.

The rush of air that he inhales drags itself into his lungs. For all intents and purposes, his body had been dead for the last minute or so. He’s gasping in air, shakily sitting himself up from where his body had collapsed. From the corner of his eye he sees Lup drop back into her body and hears her shakily drawing in her first breath. Taako’s there then, helping her sit up and lean against him and then pulling Barry upright too. Taako’s pressed between the two of them as they catch their bearings. Barry can feel him shaking, hands clutching at both of them tightly.

“What the fuck,” he says after a few moments, “was that nod? What are we, strangers? Am I a stranger that you just had an understanding with? So stiff, so impersonal. You could have given a spooky thumbs up and it would have been better.”

His voice sounds thick and raw and Barry kindly doesn’t mention it. “I don’t know, I was disoriented from the whole soul ripping thing. Did the first thing I could think of.”

Lup reaches out a hand and he meets her halfway, slipping his fingers between hers. She grins at him, tired and hitched up at the side. “We’re fucking unstoppable, babe.”

Taako makes a noise and sticks his tongue out and Barry smiles. “What, too sappy for you?”

“Sap and me don’t go together.” He doesn’t make any move to get out of this unplanned cuddle pile that he’s put himself in. “You’re both okay, right?”

“Never been better, bro bro,” Lup says as she flicks at his ear. He wrinkles his face at her and she wrinkles hers back at him.

“Drained,” Barry says truthfully, “but otherwise good.”

“Gods, you two are some grade A idiots,” Taako says, squeezing his arms around them tighter.

“Well now you’re stuck with us longer each cycle so you can shove it,” she replies, settling in against his shoulder.

“Aw Lulu, you can’t go to sleep out here on your fuckin’ death hill,” Taako whines, pushing at her to make her sit up.

“Mmm, I think she’s got the right idea,” Barry says.

“Ugh.” Taako flops unceremoniously onto the ground, dislodging both of them. Lup lets out a yelp and Barry gives a quiet “oof” as he hits the grass. “We’re not sleeping out here.”

“Jokes on you,” Lup says as she lays back down against him. “You just made it easier for me to sleep on you.”

Taako doesn’t say anything, letting her lay against his shoulder. Barry sits angled for a second, unsure, before Taako holds out an arm in invitation for him too. He takes it, resting on his other side. 

It’s an anxious rest of the cycle, waiting to drop the lich bomb on the rest of the crew. He hems and haws over how to do it, wondering whether he should test out the new lich powers on the Hunger at the end of the year or wait until next cycle to explain things better. Lup steals his moment when she steps backwards off the edge of the Starblaster, letting her body break on the ground and the lich spring out.

It’s cool as fuck, if he’s being honest with himself, and he’s only a little miffed that she didn’t drag him off with her.

“What was that?” Davenport asks as soon as they reform. “What you did to the Hunger there at the end when you jumped off. I’ve never seen you do that.”

Taako removes himself from his sister’s grip fairly quickly to go lean against the rail. He looks pleased with himself, getting to watch this conversation happen. Lup comes up next to Barry and wraps herself around him.

“You want me to take this one or do you wanna do it, babe?”

“Take what?” Merle asks, crossing his arms. 

“I’ll take it,” Barry says, steeling himself. “So I’ve been researching different types of magic, things to make us stronger, better suited against the Hunger. We’re kind of useless once we die for the year, so we came up with something that… removes that effect.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Ugh, Bar, we gotta be straight to the point. We’re liches.”

Merle looks like someone’s slapped him and Barry grimaces. That’s the exact reaction he was hoping wouldn’t happen. Magnus mouths the word to himself but doesn’t do anything else. Lucretia looks between the two of them, opening her mouth to say something before closing it again. Davenport looks lost, like of all the answers he could have thought of, that one was nowhere near his brain.

“Why that?” 

“We’re still us,” Lup says before he can say anything. “Still Lup and Barry. Just a little spookier.”

“Just a little- that doesn’t even begin to explain anything!” Merle rubs at the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “This is a permanent thing, right? Because it’s with your souls?”

“Yes it’s a permanent thing. There was a lot of research put into this. We’re here now. If one of us dies we won’t be gone for the rest of the year. And you saw what Lup did out there. It's magic, Merle, just a different kind. You’ve known me for how long? When have I ever put any of us, or anyone, in danger with necromancy?”

“You ripped your fucking souls out of your body!”

“Is that what that is?” Magnus pipes up from the background. Lucretia leans in close to him and starts explaining liches quietly to him.

“How do you think this is going to help?” Davenport asks, staring at the two of them.

“Well Barry already went over most of it. It’s just souped up magic. I can blow shit up without a wand now, more stuff and faster. Plus we’re here all the time, which I’m thinking isn’t that great right about now with all of your bummer reactions. I mean come on, what the hell you guys. Merle can go play shirtless chess with Johnny Vore and die every time and no one bats an eye, but Barry and I give ourselves something tangible and good to work with and you all lose your minds? Fuck! We’re still us, and we’re not gonna go all lich crazy. If that was going to happen it would have happened when we did the ritual. Get your heads out of your asses.”

Merle still looks distrustful, but Lucretia and Magnus seem a lot more open to the whole idea. Davenport seems like he’s mulling it over, but he still looks wary. Of all the people to take this badly, he didn’t expect it to be Merle. He thought Davenport would lose his cool until they explained it better, but Merle’s coming out of left field for him.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Merle says to Taako. 

“Mm, I already said what I had to say about it to them.” He says it so casually, still leaned against the railing. 

“You knew?”

“I was there when they did it,” he says as he pushes himself back into the group. “I get you freaking out about it, believe me. I did enough of that. But come on, the damage is done and they’re clearly still themselves. And you gotta admit, Lup's fall off the side of the ship was pretty sick.”

“Why not tell us first?” Lucretia asks. “I get Taako knowing, but why not the rest of us?”

“It would have felt too much like asking permission. It wasn’t really a group choice. We decided, and we did it. I’m… I’m _really_ not getting why you’re all so upset by this. We’re so much closer to ending this than we were, and I don’t get why you can’t see that! Do you- do you want me to fucking blow myself up right now so you can see that I’m still myself when I’m a lich? Is that what you need to see to get it?”

Lup puts a hand on his arm and he takes a deep breath. He’s having a lot of emotions right now and he needs to keep them in check if he’s going to convince anyone that this is a fine thing to have happened. “Gods, sorry, I just really didn’t think we’d be having a fight about this, especially since it can’t be undone. We’re liches, and we’re going to be liches for the foreseeable future.”

Merle crosses his arms. “Fine, I guess. Just break all the rules of life and death and act like it’s okay.”

Taako laughs. “You think they’re the only ones doing that? Look at this ship, plant man. Look at all of us. Look at yourself. This doesn’t exactly count as ‘following the rules of life and death.’ We all come back to life. Over and over. I’d thought you’d lost your respect for rules like that by now.”

“Well,” Magnus says. “I might not know all that much about magic, but you both seem perfectly fine, so I don’t really care. If you think this’ll help against the Hunger, that’s cool, but all I really care about is if you’re alright.”

“We’re perfectly fine, Maggie,” Lup says, mouth quirking up on one side.

“Well, good! Ripping out your souls and stuffing them back into your bodies doesn’t exactly sound fun, but I guess if that’s what you really wanted to do good for you.”

Barry closes his eyes and breathes in deep. Something aches in his throat and he ignores it. Lup squeezes the hand she has on his arm and he feels that ache grow bigger. He reopens his eyes and wills whatever wetness is trying to get out away.

“I understand why you didn’t tell us, but I still wish you would have,” Lucretia says. “It’s dangerous magic, and being able to expect something going wrong would have been better than knowing second hand after something horrible had happened, but because it didn’t I guess it’s fine.”

She pauses for a second, and the carefully schooled look on her face drops into something a little more open and honest. “But you’d better fucking tell us next time you plan some dumb shit like that. We could have lost you forever and we never even knew it. I don’t care if you’re liches or not, I care that you’re here and okay and that it stays like that.”

Barry doesn’t say anything but nods. He can understand her anger at them. If she’d done something like this without at least mentioning it to him he’d be upset as well. If any of them had done something like this and hadn’t said anything he’d be upset.

“I’d prefer you bring things like this to me first. It’s for the group cause, so I feel I should have at least known about it as your captain by name, but you’re both still here and completely present so I think I can offer some leeway.”

“So formal, Dad’n’port,” Lup says, wrapping her arms around Barry’s middle in an attempt to help him level out his emotions. “As if we haven’t known each other for eighty three years.”

“I’m saying I’m glad you’re okay.” Davenport looks between the two of them. “And I’m saying the same as Lucretia that I’d like to know in the future when you’re going to pull stuff that has actual lasting consequences.”

“Merle?” Lup asks for him.

Merle stares at Barry for a moment. There’s a lot of tension in the air, and Taako makes an exhausted sounding sigh. “God, can you two just make up already so we don’t have to go through three years of petty back and forth where you both actually care about each other a lot but both of you are too stubborn to admit that you both said some mildly bad things to each other in the beginning and it just got worse and worse until you finally get into a big fight in front of everyone that involves throwing any nearby objects at each other and you both tearfully admit that you never hated them, only cared for them, and there’s lots of hugging?”

Everyone stares at Taako except for Lup, who Barry can feel smiling into the top of his head. “We had a very dramatic adolescence.”

“Fine,” Merle says gruffly. “I get why you did it, but fuck Barry that’s some freaky magic. If it had gone wrong there wouldn’t have been any way to help you.”

“But it didn’t.” His voice wavers a little and Lup squeezes him tighter. “It didn’t, and we’re fine, and I don’t understand why you can’t get that.”

“It’s dark magic, and I’m not a fan, but more importantly it’s the principle of the thing. If you go off to do something dangerous and life threatening, you tell us. Especially if it makes it so you coming back every cycle isn’t a viable option. If you’d gone all, lich crazy, we wouldn’t be standing here. Every cycle we’d have to get rid of you, somehow, and no one wants to do that.”

“I’m not sorry,” Barry says, “but I understand. I get it. But it’s done now, so can you please just accept it?”

“Yeah yeah, I guess. Not like I’m one to stay mad at any of you for long anyways.”

Barry slips out of Lup’s grasp and pulls Merle into a hug, who pats his back rather enthusiastically and says, “Don’t scare us like that again,” quietly into his ear.

It’s a tense couple of days between the crew until things settle back down. Taako’s the only one anywhere near normal, but the others slowly start adjusting, with Magnus asking the most questions about it all.

Barry dies halfway through the year, some ice monster in a cave while searching for the light, which means he gets to be a fully fledged lich the rest of the cycle.

Merle is, again, the most put off by it. He actively avoids Barry those first couple days. And then he gets over himself and interacts with him like a normal person again. Barry can’t touch any people, but he can touch non-living thing, which is interesting. It’s not so fun not being able to participate in eating food like everyone else, or sleeping the time away, but it gives him time to do more research. He gets very tired of research very quickly and end up awkwardly hovering near people most of the time.

He does get to take out some of his pent up energy at the end of the year, though, using magic without limits during their last moments on that plane. He feels strong and powerful, more powerful than he ever has, and he can understand why it’s easy to get lost in the feeling. There’s so much potential, and there’s always that feeling of being able to push just a little bit farther for a little bit longer and he’ll get exactly that rush that he’s looking for.

When he comes back to himself on the Starblaster, it takes him a solid five minutes to get used to the feeling of having a restrictive body again. His soul wants to burst out of his chest and drag all that power back into his hands, but he holds it in, physically pressing a hand to his middle to make it feel realer.

“It’s a lot,” he says to Lup after she drags him away from everyone else so he can actually pull himself together. “It feels like there’s this limit of power I can use, but once I hit it, it scoots up just a little bit, and then a little bit more, and a little more, until it’s too much and it tries to take control of me.”

“Babe, that doesn’t explain what just happened.” She’s holding his face between her hands and staring at him intently. “You got all jerky and twitchy.”

“It wanted out. My soul. It wanted to be back like that.”

She makes a face and relaxes her shoulders. “Probably a nasty side effect of being a physical lich for so long. I bet it’ll get easier with practice.”

“Maybe, but it’s still not great. I’d rather not feel like I’m dying every time I come back to life.”

“I’m sure it’ll go away.”

It never really goes away, and Lup understands once she’s been dead for a while and comes back. She holds her hands over her mouth and her ears pin back flat against her head as she sinks into a ball on the ground to try and keep herself contained. It’s the only really negative side effect they’ve found, and while it’s unpleasant, it only happens after years they’ve existed as a lich for about six months and up. They get used to it, and it gets easier and quicker to keep themselves stable after a reset.

There’s a lot of self control involved with not using too much power and going crazy. He wants and he wants and he wants to reach out and grab it for himself, to make himself dizzy and sick off the raw energy that’s made available to him, but he holds onto his emotions and his memories and keeps himself together.

“Do you think it was the right choice?”

Merle asks him this one day when he still has a body, not dying this cycle.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “On one hand there’s a lot that goes into keeping us _us_ , but it’s not all that difficult. We did a lot of planning prior, making sure we had moments, had memories that would stick out and define us, define our persons. But damn if it isn’t tempting to just reach out and grab all that untapped potential.”

Merle hums around a cup of tea. Barry had never really had a taste for tea, it was always too bitter for him. He’s nursing his own cup of water, and he takes a sip.

“But,” he says after drinking, “we get to be here more often, and we get to do more damage to the Hunger every time we fight it. It sucks not being able to touch anyone or eat anything and not sleep ever, but there’s so much we’ve gained with this, by just being able to stick around longer.”

“Yeah,” Merle says. “Everything’s always got two sides to it. But the good seems to outweigh the bad for this one, and you two seem to have a pretty good handle on keeping yourselves together, even if it is a little rough to watch you try and keep your souls in your bodies after some of the resets.”

Barry winces. “Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s maybe the worst part.”

“Well if that’s the worst part, I think you’re doin’ pretty good.”

Barry smiles and settles into his side of the couch. “Why were you so upset when you found out we’d done it? There’s plenty of risks with lichdom, but you know I’d always triple check for any potential screw up for either of us.”

He frowns and takes a drink of his tea to stall for time. Barry passes his cup from hand to hand. “I don’t really know. I just never thought you’d ever go that deep into necromancy for something. I should have figured, seeing as you’ve got more than one degree in the stupid thing, but liches always seemed off the table.”

“But—”

“Yeah I get it, necromancy’s your whole thing and all that good stuff. I know. But liches were never really advertised as being the everyday middle aged looking human man and his pyromaniac partner of an elf that make up part of your family. Liches were always a scary story, something to be terrified of running into, if you were ever unlucky enough to go into the dark places of the world and find one. Becoming one wasn’t even spoken about, and it didn’t need to be. If you were taught how liches self destructed when they didn’t have a good enough handle on themselves, which was always, you knew how dangerous being around one could be. They were volatile and pure arcane destruction and tore down whatever was near them. You’d never think twice about becoming one and losing yourself like that.”

“We won’t lose ourselves,” Barry says, because he’s not sure what else he can say.

“Oh I know that now, you two did too many fail safes to let the generic lich path get you.”

“You’re not going to lose us, Merle. We’re all sticking together.”

“Oh shut up,” he says, finishing his tea. “Don’t get all sappy on me now. We’re talking about spooky childhood moral stories, not our familial bonds or shit like that.”

“Why not both?” He says back, staring into his water. “You ever wonder what it’ll be like when all this ends?”

“Jeez, that’s some topic whiplash.”

Barry just hums. He wonders occasionally what it would be like to have a stable life, one where if he dies, he dies, and he doesn’t get any second chances at life. Where they’re not constantly running from rampant death and destruction and can actually start bonding with people that aren’t any of the seven of them.

“Not really,” Merle says. “I try to live in the moment, especially since there’s so many moments to be had here.”

“Now who’s sappy?”

“Eh,” he shrugs. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know,” he says truthfully. “It feels like we’re getting close, but still real far away. Do you get that? Like, us becoming liches feels like a step in the right direction, but I don’t even know what direction that would be.”

“We’re getting closer,” he says. “Maybe slowly, but we’re getting there.”

Barry snorts and scrubs a hand through his hair. “So much for two months exploring the planar system.”

“Do you think it would have been better if it were just two months?”

He’s quiet, because as long as it’s been and as tired of everything as he is, there’s so many good moments that have happened. “Is it selfish if I say no?”

“I mean yeah, a little, but I think we’ve earned a little selfishness, don’t you think?”

“I have no clue where I’d be if we’d come back from this trip in two months. Dead, absolutely, I’m way past normal and way above average human age, but I don’t know what my life would have been like. Alone in the lab with our findings wishing for something bigger? Honestly, as shitty as it’s been this is probably the best possible outcome for me.”

“You never thought about your life and what would happen in the future?”

“Not really,” he admits. “Never really planned all that great. My life has been a series of happy and unhappy accidents with a lot of trying really hard not to get removed from whatever life position I’d swindled my way into. Come on, you knew me. I never talked about the future, and I never wanted to. I mean, dreams and all that, but the future was terrifying.”

“That… does not sound great.”

“Those first few years of college, when everything went to shit? I had exactly zero plan. I think that’s part of why it was that bad. I couldn’t imagine doing anything after school. People stopped asking what I wanted to _do_ with my life after I figured out a major and that helped, I think, not having the constant questions. But it all worked out didn’t it?  We’re all here now and I can’t ever die but neither can anyone else because of this ship and our bonds, I guess, so it’s all good.”

Merle’s staring at him and Barry sighs. “I made that sound like a massive bummer, but really it’s, it’s mixed. It’s a bit of a bummer, but also I get to be with you guys for the rest of my forever life, so there’s that.”

“You need a positive hobby.”

Barry snorts. “Yeah? And what do you suggest, gardening?”

“Nah, you’re shit at gardening. Something more spooky, like bone collecting.”

“Bone collecting. Like- like collecting everyone’s bones when they die? That’s like… Merle what the fuck?”

“Hey, I never said it had to be that, I just know you’re into that kind of weird shit. Dead bodies and stuff. Who knows, maybe it’d come in handy.”

“Bones, coming in handy, for our fight against the Hunger.”

“I don’t know what your fancy necromantic spells take for components! Who knows how many bones you’d need for a big finale of a spell.”

“I not gonna beat the Hunger with our family’s bones, what the hell? If I could do that I would have already. But sure, I’ll humor you. The next time I die, I’ll harvest my bones and see what I can do with them.”

“Cool!”

True to his word, the next time his physical body dies he strips it of skin and meat until there’s nothing left but a skeleton, which he moves into the lab.

“What the fuck,” Taako says the first time he walks in with it in there. “Why in the godsdamn hell do you have a skeleton, Bluejeans?”

“Merle said I should start collecting bones,” he says as he floats over it, setting the bones to stay together with magic. “So I’ve got all of mine here.”

“You listened to Merle on _life advice_? And that life advice was collecting your dead body’s bones?”

“Who knows, maybe they’ll come in handy one day.”

And they do, eventually, come in handy, if nothing but to uphold an aesthetic. Lup comes bouncing up to him in cycle ninety two, gushing about one of the floating islands having a huge magic facility with intensely powerful items being made on it.

They’re surprisingly open to introducing them to the art of artificing, even if they have to go through the intensive training just like everyone else. _This_ is the step he’s been feeling, that next step in defeating the Hunger, warding it off. If they can master this kind of magic, then handling the Light to keep it away from the yearly apocalypse should be nothing.

“We’re so close,” he says to Lup as they’re planning out which items they’d like to make in the Arcaneum. “So fucking close.”

“Well I don’t know about you, but I’m nowhere near close to being done with my design.”

“No,” he says. “I mean, no I’m not either. Close to the end, I mean. I can feel it. This is the missing piece to our research, I just know it is.”

“Babe, we gotta do baby steps. We haven’t even proven we can make these fancy ass magic items yet. Once we get past that hurdle, we’ll take on the Hunger and the Light with this. Now, aesthetics. We’re essentially making weapons, which, eh? But magic weapons, which is better. Weapons that can do magic, or magic things that can be doubled as weapons. We gotta narrow down our designs a bit. You have got a very plain wand scribbled down on your paper, and I have… a scribbly mess, so let’s get working.”

He really doesn’t want anything all that gaudy, he’s never been one for flashiness, but he’d like this to be a little bit special. He’s a high level wizard, and he’s been using necromancy for years. While his outer appearance may not give that away, he’d love for this magic item to give some sort of a hint.

“Lup,” he says quietly, turning his paper a bit. “Bear with me here, but what if my magic item got… spooky.”

“Spooky?” He turns to see her grinning. “How spooky are we talking?”

“What if,” he says, spinning his chair around to face the skeleton set up in the corner, “I used one of my bones to make a wand?”

She doesn’t say anything, and he turns to look at her again. She’s got the biggest open mouthed grin on her face, and she waves her hands all around.

“That is! Incredible! Spooky! Sleek! Literally you! I love it!”

“You think?” He rubs the back of his neck, a little embarrassed at how interested in the idea she is.

“Of course I think! It’s really important though, which bone are you using?

“Oh, uh, I hadn’t really gotten that far. Leg bones are too long, but forearms get all curvy, so probably the humerus.”

“Oh shit, you get the whole knobby bone handle and everything. I fucking love it. I’m so fucking stoked to see that bad boy done.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t have _anything_. Ugh, design is not my passion. I want it to like, eat up magic stuff to get more powerful, but I don’t even know how I’d make it do that.”

“You wanna make a vore thing?”

Lup spins her chair around so fast it almost knocks into him, and he doesn’t have time to scoot away before she’s clamping a hand down on his mouth. “Please, Barry, Barold, love of my extra long life, please never say I want to make a vore thing ever again in all of your lives. You know I don’t want that attached onto my brand.”

He scoots her hand away. “That is what you said though. You want your thing to chomp down on all those used up magical items and fill it up with more energy?”

Lup makes a gagging sound and he smiles. “Nasty. Your dirty talk is awful, you know that?”

“You know, like swallow—”

“Nope!” She covers his mouth again, spinning her chair around so she’s behind him and has leverage. “We’re not keeping on that road. At all, never ever. Ever. I’m gonna design my not vore related object, and you are going to finish thinking up ways to make your own bones your spooky new wand. Please, for all that is good, don’t say vore things again when I take my hands away.”

He mumbles “no promises,” into her hand and he feels her shrug. “Good enough.”

Barry doesn’t bring it back up while she’s designing, but when she demonstrates the Umbrastaff for him, how it turns inside out to absorb the beaten magicians magic item, he can’t help but laugh.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says between giggles. “It looks so cool. But fuck, babe, it really does just chew it up and eat it.”

“I hate you,” she says flatly as he laughs, leaning on the umbrella. “Gods, you can’t even let me have this umbrella, this cool ass umbrella. Taako says I look like a clown, so I guess I’m just Lulu the fucking Vore Clown now. Guess that’s just who I am forever. Fuck. This umbrella is cool as fuck and no one godsdamn appreciates that.”

She’s halfway upset about no one appreciating her “super fucking cool umbrella, fuck you guys,” for a couple of days until Barry finally gives and gives an apology that she seemingly brushes off but it definitely shows that she appreciates it. She is more than enthused for his bone wand, grabbing it from him and turning it over in her hands.

“Ohhhh, it’s all smooth, but it still has all the bumps and ridges. And it doesn’t even get all gross and marrowy even though you tapered it down? The handle is, hands down, the coolest part. Without that it just looks like your average kind of weird wand, but then you get to the handle and it’s like ‘actually this is bone, and guess whose bone its is? Mine, that’s who.’”

“Hey!” Merle exclaims when he shows it to him. “Looks like those bones did come in handy. I told you bone collecting would be good.”

“Now my skeleton is missing one half of an arm, but it’s worth it for how awesome this thing looks. Also using magic with it? Very smooth.”

“Yeah? I don’t know much about wizardry, but that’s what you want from your wand.”

The end of the year comes quickly, but him and Lup are working intently with the Light and artificing, and they come up with a plan. To split up the Light into seven different items, one from each of them, and send them out into the world to be used and craved as they please.

“It’s an end,” he says hoarsely as he stares down at their notes. “It’s- it’s actually and end. Lup, Lup we found a fucking end.”

She’s holding the Umbrastaff in her arms, head resting on the table. She looks as exhausted as he feels. As soon as they’d made their items, they’d moved full focus into putting this knowledge into the Light. And for as many late, late nights as they’ve had, it’s absolutely worth it for this.

He holds the notes out for her to inspect and she holds them close to her face, eyes squinted. “Fuck,” she says. “It really is.”

It’s hard to fight the urge to wake everyone up and show them this, the end to this forever death they’ve found, but they wait for the end of the year meeting. Present their evidence there, demonstrate what they mean with cool visuals.

He hates putting down Lucretia’s idea as much as Lup does, and he can tell she really hates it. But cutting off the plane they’re in from the rest of the planar system, severing every bond between them, cutting the ties between the gods and their world, the astral plane and their world, it’s too high of a risk. It could kill every single person, easily.

Barry grabs Lucretia a few days after. “How are you?”

“Fine?” She says, looking at him. “I don’t see why I wouldn’t be. We’ve got a plan for the end, everyone’s excited.”

“I just, about your idea.”

“Mm,” she says, lips pursing. “That. You and Lup told me it wouldn’t work, I don’t see why we’re still talking about it.”

“I, shit, exactly that. I don’t want hard feelings attached with that. Our idea is dangerous, definitely, but cutting off the plane—”

“I already heard this, Barry, I don’t need you rubbing it in my face whose idea got picked. We all know, everyone was there.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Just,” she says, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose. “Just don’t, alright? I get it. It’s fine. I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to fight with you. We’ll do your plan, and it’ll be over. We’ll be done, and that’ll be that.”

He doesn’t press her for more after that, though he knows she still disagrees with their idea.

Cycle ninety nine comes around, they find the Light early, and immediately they split it up. They’ve had years to plan, to design, but the actual creation is nerve-wracking. The bell he ends up with is about the size of his hand, and he can feel both the Light and his own magical energy inside of it. There’s a pull, of course, that craveability as Magnus calls it, but they’ve all been exposed to the Light for too long for it to have much of an effect on them. Lup makes her gauntlet, chocked full of fire evocation magic. It’s simple looking, yet there’s a certain adornment and glint to it that draws the eye in. Magnus’s is a cup, a chalice if they’re talking specifics, and the voice and draw of that one feels homey. Taako, surprisingly, makes a plain stone. Simple, fits in the palm of your hand, but incredibly powerful. Merle’s, the sash, looks so much like him that it would make him smile if not for the direness of their situation. Davenport’s monocle seems so formal, and yet the magic stored inside it reflects their captain easily. Lucretia’s is interesting. The staff is as tall as she is, if not taller, blue stone in the center, white wood creating the main body. It thrums of comfort and responsibility, which Barry would think an unfitting mix if he didn’t know her.

The few days after creating them are tense, constant checks into the ethereal plane just to see if the white eyes are back. But nothing. And more nothing. And there continues to be nothing and they finally breathe a sigh of relief. It’s over.

It’s over.

They split up to present their items to the world, leaving them hiding in places or with certain people. Barry hears about Magnus almost dying because he didn’t bring enough water and forgot that dying had actual consequences now, and that the people he left the chalice with were so nice to him.

Barry leaves the Animus Bell in the middle of the woods, nestled in the hollow of a tree. Necrotic energy is dangerous in the wrong hands, not that all magic isn’t, and he wants it just out of the way enough.

When they all meet back up on the Starblaster, there’s a beat, and then Lup lets out the biggest woop he’s ever heard from her.

“We’re done!” She yells. “We’re done and we got a good fucking plane for the rest of our lives!”

It’s a good first few months, exploring and meeting people. They don’t hear much of the relics being used, but he knows they must be. There’s talk of joining the living down below, setting the Starblaster down on the outskirts of a town and starting their lives anew.

And then the reports start coming in.

Lup goes to bed early one night without saying goodnight to anyone, let alone Barry. When he follows her in some time later, he finds her curled up on top of the covers, clothes still on.

“Hey,” he says quietly, touching her shoulder. She doesn’t turn to look at him. “What’s wrong?”

“It burnt up a small town,” she says, still curled up. “The gauntlet. Some asshole got ahold of it and went crazy and burned the whole thing up. There’s just- there’s just a big circle of glass left.”

“Oh,” he says, and he doesn’t know what else to say. He slips his shoes and his belt off and lays down next to her. She puts her hand over the hand he lays on her hip, twining their fingers together without looking. “I… shit Lup, I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t say anything, but her body turns back around, facing him. She undoes their fingers only to press her face into his chest. Lup doesn’t talk the rest of the night, and Barry keeps an arm wrapped around her for the whole of it.

The reports continue like that. Not always Lup, but it’s never good. Unnaturally horrible storms plague a countryside for a while before abruptly stopping. Unheard of monsters pop up in cities, destroying things or people before disappearing. Cities disappear from maps, not because they’re gone, but because wards keep everyone and everything out. Whole towns turn to crystal or wood at the drop of a hat.

Barry and Magnus are the only ones not to see a trace of their relics, and it’s almost scarier that way.

Taako learns about the city of Armos, a child turning everything around them to peppermint, and it’s a good week of constant snapping at anyone.

Barry and him talk about families and loss and talking dust at the one year anniversary of their being here, and it’s a wholly enlightening conversation on how Taako’s trying to process all the bad that’s happening around them. The way he’s taking it is not good, but neither is the way anyone else is, so what does it matter?

Barry treks onto the ship one day, returning from a supply run with Magnus, and Merle looks glum. “Something’s up with Lup. She locked herself in your guys’ room and won’t come out even for Taako.”

He knocks on the door before trying to open it, seeing if maybe she’ll open it for him herself. There’s a buzz of magic around the door that he can feel in his fingertips, smell in the air. The door doesn’t open. He tries the handle and it sticks. Locked. He sighs.

“Lup, I’m coming in,” he warns, just so she can ready herself. And then he casts Knock.

He closes the door behind him, just for some privacy while he figures out why she’s locked herself away like this, and when he does it becomes immediately apparent what spell she’d used. As soon as the door slips shut he can hear her sobbing, curled up in a blanket in the corner. There’s a modified Silence surrounding the entire room, completely blocking any sound when the door is open.

“Lup,” he says, carefully walking over next to her. She doesn’t try to blast him with anything, so he sits a little bit away from her to giver her some space. “ _Lup_. What is it?”

She wails louder, burying her face in her knees. He doesn’t see her cry often. She doesn’t really cry, letting her frustrations out through magic instead. He’s always been the bigger crybaby. Him and Taako are the only ones who ever get to see it, and it’s an incredibly rare occasion.

Lup makes a wavy motion with her hand, not looking at him, and he scoots closer until she can lean against him, and she does, burying her face in his shoulder. She doesn’t say anything, just cries until she can’t anymore, and then she just keeps her face pressed against him.

It’s a long while before she speaks, and when she does it’s half mumbled into his shirt. “City named Cordelia, burnt up to a fucking crisp.”

He holds her tight. “Why’s this one so bad?”

“Thousands of people are dead.”

“Fuck,” punches out of him, air escaping with it. This is the biggest by far. It’s always been small towns, middle of the countryside, a few hundred people at most. For death tolls to start jumping into the thousands is bad.

“Fuck is right,” she mutters, and she sounds so tired. Her voice is raw from the crying and her hands shake as she moves to wrap them around him. “My stupid fuckin’ too craveable full on fire magic item. Stupid. Fire magic, how could that be good? All it does is burn shit up, that’s never good. Gods. Gods, this isn’t what I wanted to happen Barry.”

“I know,” he says, because it’s all he can. “It’s not your fault. It isn’t. This is still better than the alternative.”

“If the world burns itself up from my stupid creation then it isn’t. It’s just as bad.”

“It’s not.” Barry squeezes her tighter and she relaxes a little. “It’s never as bad. We tried to help. This is just… nasty side effects.”

“Shitty side effects. Tear the world up slower instead of being devoured whole all at once.”

“It’s better, Lup. I promise.”

She doesn’t agree with him, but she doesn’t disagree either so he takes it as a win. It’s a quiet night after that, no one tries to disturb them. In the morning she tells them all stone faced what happened, and he leaves her and Taako to talk about it.

Lup finds him on the deck of the Starblaster later that night, staring down at the world they’ve chosen to save, at least they thought they were saving it. She knocks their shoulders together and he glances at her before going back to looking down.

“You good?” She asks.

“I’m good,” he replies, offering a hand up for holding. She takes it. “Are you feeling better?”

“I… yeah. I’m feeling better. Taako helped. You helped. I just needed to think some, I guess.” She sounds very sure of herself, and it’s so much better than the mess she sounded last night.

The stand at the edge there for a while, until Lup forces him to turn and face her. She kisses him gently and he wraps his arms around her waist.

“I love you,” she says. She stares him down and holds his face in her hands. “I love you so fucking much, Barry.”

“I love you too,” he says, raising a questioning eyebrow. “Why so serious about it?”

She looks pained for a moment before she shakes it off her face. “Just… I want you to know that. I love you.”

“I know,” he whispers. “I’ve known, you never made that unclear.”

“Good,” she says, and then she presses another kiss to his lips. “C’mon, let’s go to bed.”

Barry wakes up in the morning to a cold and empty side of the bed next to him. He figures Lup must have gotten up a while ago, gotten started on something early for the day. He shuffles around, getting ready for the day slowly.

Then there’s a frantic slamming on his door and he gets his clothes on quickly, grabbing his wand before opening the door. Taako’s standing outside, a piece of paper clutched tightly in his hand, and he looks past Barry.

“Is Lup here?”

“No? I thought she got up early. Why?” Something cold is settling in the pit of his stomach. Taako holds out his hand and Barry takes the paper.

All that’s on it is “Back soon,” signed with her name and a kiss of lipstick, and he stares down at it, not really comprehending.

“I mean, she- she probably just ran down planetside for something, right?”

“Why wouldn’t she tell you? Why not tell anyone? No one saw her this morning, she must have left really early. Fuck, shit I don’t even know where she’d go.”

“Taako, what—”

“Lup’s gone, Barry. She left to go, I don’t know, get the gauntlet back probably. And she left by herself. Without telling any of us. All we have is this _fucking_ note she left on the table and it gives us nothing!”

“Shit,” he says as it finally gets through his brain. “Shit. That’s why she was so weird last night. Fuck. Fuck! Taako, fuck!”

“Hey, whoa, Barry—”

“I should’ve known she was gonna do this. She was so final about saying ‘I love you’ last night. And Cordelia, of course she’s still upset over it, I don’t know why I believed her when she said she was fine. Gods, fuck, what if something happens—”

“Barry!” He grabs him by the shoulders, shaking him a little. Barry looks at Taako and he looks like he’s been shot. “Stop it. Please. It’s not your fault. Don’t… don’t do that, okay? Don’t start blaming yourself. She’ll be back. I’m sure of it. She did this when we were kids sometimes, leave to prove a point. She always came back soon.”

“Are you telling me to wait?”

“No just stop freaking out on me, okay? You’re gonna make me freak out, and Taako’s deffo good not doing that.”

“I’m going down,” he says, pulling himself out of Taako’s grip. “Are you coming with?”

“Yeah, jeez, hold your horses, Barold. Lemme go grab some stuff.”

They go down to Cordelia together, splitting up to cover more ground. There’s no sign of her anywhere, not in the woods on what was the east side of the city, not near the farmlands on the west, not one trace.

They come back together at midday, sweaty and tired. Taako looks frustrated and Barry feels a little bit empty, and as they walk to go back up to the Starblaster to either debrief everyone on the situation or enlist everyone’s help, Taako lets out this yell and casts a fireball down at the ground.

“Taako—”

“Fuck!” He kicks at the burning pile of grass. “Godsdammit!”

“We’re going to find her,” Barry says, and it feels hollow. He’s doing the comforting now, and he feels like he’s doing a pretty shit job of it.

“I know we’re _going_ to, I just want her back now.”

“Me too,” he says, and Taako looks at him and sighs.

“Let’s just… go back to the fuckin’ ship, my dude.”

It’s a somber mood when they get back. No one asks how it went, they can see they’re both empty handed. Barry tells himself that night that he’s going to go to bed and that tomorrow he’ll find her, and he knows he’s lying to himself.

The search seems to get more and more fruitless. He goes to the latest glassing, an empty black battlefield with no clues, and sits in the middle of the circle and tries to feel out her energy.

Nothing.

He follows any signals for major arcane energy, asking everyone he can if they’ve seen a woman in a red robe.

Nothing.

He pins down a map and draws out the glassings in heavy black marker and makes bright red X’s on the arcane energy sources. And he stays at that map, triangulating everything he can. There’s a cave near Phandolin that’s been giving off some pretty heavy energy waves, and the battlefield glassing isn’t too far from it. He half falls asleep staring at it.

Barry’s jolted out of his dozing by Taako coming onto the deck, asking about glassings.

His memories start getting fuzzy, and he wonders if he’s more tired from searching than he thought. But… what’s the search for? Lup? Who… wait, where… Lup? What does her face look like? Taako’s standing in front of him and his face is getting blurry and Barry starts to panic, asks him to kill him in a frantic voice because if he dies he’ll remember, remember who? Lup? He think’s that’s her… what’s happening?

And then he’s blasted in the chest and he hits the railings for a second, and he gives Taako, (Taako?) a smile before falling off the rails, and his body dies before he hits the ground.

As the lich rises from his body his thoughts clear back up. He can see Lup’s face clearly in his mind, remember her name without his brain fogging over, can think about his family without getting the edges of a headache.

When he looks up the Starblaster is moving away, all of his family onboard. He has no idea what just happened. It had to be Fisher, but how? He doesn’t go back up because if they don’t remember their hundred year journey, they won’t remember who he is, and they definitely won’t remember he’s a friendly lich, not just a dark force trying to kill them. He casts a stasis spell on his body, just in case he needs it, and takes a few moments to catch his bearings.

Lup is still gone. He could go out to where he was going to look next, or he could figure out what the fuck is going on. Besides, if wherever she is is powerful enough to trap a lich, it might not be best to go just yet. He wants to, gods he wants to go find her so they can figure this out together, because she would remember, she’d have to, but he can’t do that just yet.

If he’s remembering correctly there’s a cave nearby, uninhabited and fairly well hidden. He drags his body to it, propping it up against a wall. He has to keep calm. He has to keep it together. Literally. He can’t go all crazy lich just because of… this. This horrible, confusing thing that’s happened.

It’s a few days of being in that cave, trying to figure out exactly what could have happened. He doesn’t want to leave for fear of being seen, and for fear of drawing attention to the cave where his only possessions are his dead body and the clothes and wand he had on him.

Lucretia has to remember, he decides. She was humming that song that no one could remember, the one only he could understand when he was a lich. So either she fed all their information to Fisher, or Fisher somehow got ahold of her journals and had a very filling dinner. He doesn’t want to believe the first one, but he knows it’s the most likely. But why? Their relics weren’t good, he knows. Faerun is hurting because of them, people are dying because of them. But it’s better, or they’d thought it was. It’s better than the alternative.

He wonders why she wouldn’t have them all drink Fishers weird water goop and have the entire world forget about the relics and their journey instead. The relics could stay out there, but everyone would forget about them and their want for them. The draw would still exist.

He’s so confused.

Once he’s figured that out, he considers leaving the cave. If he’s invisible, people won’t notice him. People shouldn’t really notice him anyway if Lucretia had erased him. He goes out, making sure the cave is hidden by rocks and branches, and goes to the nearest town.

It’s quiet, small, but people are acting cheerful. There’s no mention of the relics that he can hear, which confirms that she’d erased that as well. He finds a chest on the side of the road, seemingly abandoned. It’s in somewhat rough shape, but he really doesn’t have anything in the cave other than his body, and some adornments might be nice if he has to stay there for the foreseeable future. He waits until no one’s watching and slides it into a demiplane, pulling it back out once he’s back in the cave.

It sits in the corner untouched for a while, until he gets some more items to put in it. He gets some vials, takes a sampling of his blood and hair for once he figures out how to get himself a new body, and strips it of the clothing and items he had on when he died. He finally dumps it, getting rid of his still fresh looking corpse now that he has enough to make himself a new one when he needs. He folds up his clothing and puts it in the chest, putting his wand and glasses on top to prevent them being broken.

It’s about nine months until he sees anyone from his family again. He searching for them, for anything really, just to get more information, when he stumbles upon Lucretia.

She looks tired, but otherwise unhurt. He can feel magic in the air and when he looks around, his sight naturally slides over a clearing in the trees, trying to draw his attention away from it. If he tries to look at it, his sight keeps moving away. It’s a large section. Almost like…

He casts true sight and finds the Starblaster sitting there, cloaked in magic. Lucretia is working outside of a small cottage, run down and shabby. She has a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other and she’s writing down as she looks around.

Davenport walks out of the house. Something feels wrong about him, and when Barry hears him speak, he understands why.

“Davenport!” he says, and Lucretia looks at him. Her mouth twists down and she puts a hand on his shoulder.

“What is it?”

Davenport motions to the trees where Barry is, and he makes himself invisible. Lucretia looks into the woods, eyes locking with his though she doesn’t know it, and looks back down at him.

“There’s someone out there? Did the monitor go off?”

“Davenport,” he nods, and Lucretia stands, closing the journal.

“Let me go see,” she says, going inside. She draws her wand before he loses sight of her, and Davenport casts a glance at the trees before following her in.

Barry can feel himself losing control. That’s his captain. That’s his _family_. Davenport, incredible captain Davenport, leader of their mission, reduced down to only being able to say his own name? What the hell. Why is Lucretia… Why hasn’t she restored his memories yet? Why did she leave him like that?

He’s choking on anger and feels it crackling around him, and Lucretia comes back out, closing the door harshly behind her, presumably so Davenport doesn’t follow, and she’s holding something he hasn’t seen in a long time in her hands.

The Bulwark Staff fits in her hands perfectly, almost like she made it to. She’s murmuring something that he can’t hear, and he needs to pull it together before she locks him out entirely. He certain she can feel his energy around her, setting everything on edge.

He moves then, before she can pinpoint him, towards the Starblaster. There’s things on there that he needs to get. He finds the weapons they made at the Arcaneum, specifically Merle’s, Magnus’s, and Taako’s. He puts them in that pocket dimension for when he gets back. He can’t find Fisher, or he would take some of the ichor, give it to their captain, keep it for himself if he ever gets a new body.

He finds some of Lup’s things, a shirt, some jewelry. He takes the map that he’d been pinpointing her location on. He needs to move quick, before Lucretia realizes he’s here.

He takes what he can from their room, blankets, pillows, books, clothing, parts of his research that he kept there instead of the lab, pictures. He doesn’t really think, just grabs and shoves into the pocket dimension until he hears the floor creak behind the door and he shuts it, keeping the spell up for when he returns to the cave.

“Who’s there,” she says, flat voiced. “Tell me now.”

He goes invisible again, says nothing. The door bursts open and he sees her clutching the staff, eyes darting around the room.

“Whoever you are, you’re making a mistake. Either leave or show yourself. Do not try to stay here, I know you’re here.”

She eyes the things that are gone, things he’s certain she’d recognize, and he can see her falter.

“Who…” her grip tightens and she looks pained. “Barry? Lup? Are… Is one of you here?”

He can feel himself slipping again, fear anger confusion _hurt_ rising up in him, and he knows she feels the spike in energy.

“Please,” she cracks out, “please just, if you’re here, please say something. Please.”

Her voice breaks on that last please and he can’t take it anymore. He doesn’t show himself, doesn’t say anything, just quietly floats out of the room around her before she casts the spell that she can see him with. He wants to grab Davenport, take him and figure out how to undo the shit she’s done to them all, but he can’t, he doesn’t have the means to take care of him, watch over him, he’s barely got a cave.

The cave is quiet, dark, and he pulls the items he’d grabbed of the ship out into the open. The weapons he puts in a corner together. If he finds them, he’ll give them back, for now he’ll keep them here for safety. He folds up the bedding he’d grabbed and sets it up near the chest, a pile of cushy warmth. Books he arranges against the wall. Pictures he puts in the chest, along with the clothing he’d grabbed. Lup’s clothes get put on the bottom, hidden.

He tacks the map up, marking off a few new places. There’s one last piece of paper in the demiplane, small and crumpled. It’s Lup’s note, the “Back soon” almost taunting him. She never came back, she hasn’t come back, he hasn’t gotten anymore clues on where she went since he’d died.

Time blends together like this, living alone in a cave, one of two, maybe three, people that remembers anything about his life. Barry starts scribing it down, just so he knows that this is real. If it’s written, it’s real. If it’s written, far away from Lucretia, then it’s safe.

He’s not sure how long it is until he finds what he needs. It’s a necromantic auction, dark things being sold there. He’s scrounged up some gold over the year or two or three he’s spent on his own. Enough to place a decent bid on one of the two body growing machines up for sale. There’s someone else, a warlock whose face he doesn’t catch, that’s gunning for the same thing as him. They both end up with one, and one was all he really wanted or needed. He can see the grin on the warlock’s face and nothing else, and it’s the most unsettled he’s felt in a while.

The set up is easy, and the tank casts a green glow around the cave, and he pours a vial of blood in and waits.

Barry goes out and about to get some supplies one day when he hears what sounds like fabric ripping behind him.

“Well,” says a man behind him, awful accent coloring his words. “It’s not everyday you see a lich doing the equivalent of grocery shopping now is it?”

Barry turns around to find a man taller than him wearing a well fitted suit and loosely holding a scythe that’s bigger than both of them. He should be invisible right now, and if he had eyes he’d narrow them.

“Who are you?”

“An emissary of the Raven Queen, her reaper.” Barry curses under his breath and the man smiles. “And it seems you’ve caught on to why I’m here.”

“I know this looks bad,” Barry says, raising his hands, and he can see the man tense in expectation. Shit. He thinks he’s going to try to fight him. “But, technically, I’m not really your responsibility.”

“Not my responsibility? You’ve broken the laws of death, lich. Your name is Barry Hallwinter, yes? I can see you right there, plain as day.”

It’s been over a hundred years since anyone’s called him Hallwinter, and it gives him a little bit of whiplash. “Bluejeans,” he corrects unthinkingly. “Barry Bluejeans.”

“Mm, yes, that nickname is listed as well.” He tightens his grip on his scythe and points it at him. “While you’re remarkably well put together for a lich, I’m afraid it doesn’t matter much to me or my Queen. For crimes against the laws of life and death, you have been sentenced to the Eternal Stockade, where I’ll be taking you presently.”

The scythe swings at him and he dodges out of the way. “I really don’t want to fight you. And I’m _really_ not your responsibility. I not even from here.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says darkly. “Laws are laws.”

The reaper, whose name he hasn’t gotten yet, swings at him again, much faster this time, and Barry can feel it get uncomfortably close to him. This form is completely made from his soul, and that weapon is made to rip souls out. It’s a bad idea to let that get close to him.

“I mean, laws can be bent,” Barry really does not want to get into it with this guy. “Specifically for good causes, I had a cleric with me, you know. Pan and all that. He got pissed about the lich thing too, but he got over it.”

“Well, I have a job to do,” his accent is slipping, going down to something a little more natural. “And you are not going to get away from this.”

“Gods, I really am sorry,” Barry says before conjuring up a wall of force he knows is more than enough to take this guy out. It hits him full force, knocking him backwards. He lets go of the scythe and it disappears into smoke, which Barry would love to know more about one day, but definitely not now. While he’s down, he books it out of that area as fast as he can. If there’s a reaper bounty on his head, he’s a little more fucked than he thought he was. He’ll need to be careful how he uses his magic, how his emotions spike.

He’s not followed, but he stays away from the cave for a few days, just in case he comes back. He doesn’t, and on the third day he returns, finding everything as he left it. The sigh of relief that leaves him is physical, though he doesn’t need the air. His body is still growing steadily, and it’s so weird to watch it form in front of him, seeing it grow from an outsider’s perspective.

Things stay quiet for a while. He doesn’t really leave his cave while the body finishes growing. It’s slow, six months of waiting just for it to be done. There’s prep he has to do, leaving clueless Barry instructions on what he needs to do on the recording coin he found, trying to find traces of the others so he can send himself in their direction, finding ways to hide the things that will break his brain when he comes out.

The pictures have to go away, along with the weapons, the note, all of Lup’s things. He’s not even sure what he’ll remember about himself. Will Lucretia have erased his magic? His name? Everything that makes him _him_?

That last night before entering the body he thinks about his life. Little details he probably won’t remember. The IPRE, all of the classes he taught there, his family, the way they looked when they were happy or sad or furious as all get out. Lup. Her smiles, her laugh, the way she always had her hair different, a new cut or color for the new year. He doesn’t want to forget that, but he knows he will.

The Barry that comes out of the tank is still Barry Bluejeans, just different. He’s a little bit meaner, a little less skilled, and he knows no magic. He’s a fighter, not the best one around, but a fighter none the less. Parts of his life are fuzzy, a lot of his life is fuzzy, actually, and if he tries to think about it too hard he ends up with a splitting headache.

When he sleeps, he dreams of overlapping voices and laughter combined with face splitting grins and crooked smiles. There’s touching and hugging and his heartrate skyrockets. He dreams of a woman whose face he can’t see but he knows she’s beautiful. Sometimes she says his name, and if he focuses hard enough he can see her mouth, the smile that’s quirked up on one side, slim fingers attached to hands that never stop moving, needing to emphasize the point. He can feel his mouth form her name, feel the word come out of his mouth, but he wakes up before it processes. He always wakes up with an indescribable feeling of loneliness in his chest after these dreams and he’s not sure where it comes from

He drowns seven months later because he’d fallen in the river and this Barry never learned how to swim.

When his body rises from his waterlogged corpse, he lets out a scream that’s heard by no one because he was an idiot and by himself near the river and slipped on a rock. He’d been so close to finding Taako, to catching up with him finally, and now he’s got at least a six month set back because he was a fucking _idiot_.

The sound of reality tearing behind him happens again, and he can feel his form fuzzing out in his frustration. The spike in necrotic energy must have alerted his wonderful reaper friend of his presence again.

“Look who we have!” The accent is back, and Barry lets out a frustrated growl. “That’s more like it, seems more lich like not to have any control over yourself, eh?”

“Zip it,” gravels out of him as he turns around, and the man has a smirk on his face as he swings his scythe, not wasting anymore time. “I don’t want to fight you!”

“Too bad,” he says as he swings again. It almost hits him, grazes the edge of his robe, and Barry lets out a hiss.

He sends another wave of energy towards the reaper, but he’s ready for it this time. He rolls and dodges, taking a swipe for Barry’s bottom half.

“Do you even understand who I am?”

“A lich who’s broken the laws of my Queen. I don’t take kindly to those in the clear wrong trying to talk their way out of rightful punishment.”

“Gods, you’re ridiculous,” Barry says, throwing banishment his way. He can hear it hit, the popping noise of it sending him back to the Astral Plane.  He leaves as soon as the reaper is gone, doing his best to calm down. He has blood back at the cave, he can make himself a new body. He has plenty of time, as much as he needs. He keeps telling himself that as he makes his way back, lich body unstaticking and becoming something a little more mellow. He still feels high strung, but he needs to not go over a certain threshold of emotion.

While the body is growing, he makes sure to add onto the coin that he doesn’t know how to swim, and not to go near bodies of water unattended.

He finds Lucretia again, this time with a woman he vaguely recognizes. Maureen Miller. One of the people exploring the planes of existence. They’re not at the cottage, he’s certain Lucretia left there as soon as she possibly could. It’s a bigger house, built into the side of a mountain, and it blends in fairly well. They’re building something, a big something, and Lucretia seems to be attached to the Staff. There’s something different about her, though, and he’s not sure what it is. Her hair is white, and he wonders if it’s just that.

The woman, Maureen, goes inside, and Barry comes out of the woods, makes himself known. Lucretia turns towards him with a gasp, pointing the staff at him. It wobbles in her grip, and she looks almost terrified.

“Why are you here?”

“What happened to you?” Bursts out of him before he can help it. She’s… older. She looks older than him at this point. It’s not just the white hair. She looks exhausted, she’s aged, much more than she should have, and there’s a hard set to her shoulders that wasn’t there before.

“Why are you _here_ ,” she says again, insistent.

“Biding my time,” he says, cryptic.

“I…” she sags a little, setting the staff down and leaning against it. “Barry, I…”

“Lucretia, what the hell happened?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I had to.”

“Not that,” because he can’t help himself. “Though don’t get me wrong, I’m immensely pissed about that. I mean,” he motions towards her. “You. You’re older. Like, a lot older. You look… I don’t even know, Lucretia. What happened?”

“Two liches are in possession of the Animus Bell,” she says. “They’re running this messed up place called Wonderland. They feed off of people’s suffering. There are penalties to making mistakes.”

He feels horrified, he wonders if it shows. Barry can feel energy crackling around him and forces himself to calm down. The last thing he needs right now is for that reaper to show up. “I…”

“I tried to take it from them. I couldn’t.” She shudders. “I’m very lucky I got out.”

“Luce,” he half whispers. “Why’d you do it?”

“We made a promise,” she says without missing a beat. “Lup, specifically, made a promise. That we’d never hurt the people of a plane just to get the upper hand on the Hunger. Look at Faerun, Barry. Relic wars, people killing each other over our pieces of the Light, people killing thousands because they don’t understand the power they’re holding. This isn’t better, it’s just slower.”

“We could have helped you,” he says, and it’s true. If she’d asked, he’s certain Lup would have said yes. To making the world forget the relics ever existed. “You could have made us drink Fisher’s ichor, we could have done it together.”

“You and Lup would have never let me do my plan,” she says sadly. “It’s the only one that will work now, Barry, don’t you see that? We have to cut off the planes from the Hunger. It can’t feed like that.”

“That will kill everyone, Lucretia, including us. We told you that. We _told_ you. So instead of helping us come up with something new you made everyone forget and practically killed our captain?”

She flinches. “How do you—”

“I was on the Starblaster, Lucretia. That day. I saw him, saw what you made him. That’s not Davenport. You know that’s not him.”

“I did what I had to—”

“Lucretia?” Maureen walks out, a teenage boy behind her. She catches sight of Barry and draws her wand, throwing an arm out in front of her kid. It hurts, to be seen like this, but he gets it. He’s a lich, liches are notoriously evil. “Who are you?”

“An old friend,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you or your child. Besides, I was just leaving.”

Lucretia is leaning heavily against the Staff, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was holding up the entirety of her weight.

“We would have helped, Lucretia,” he says before disappearing. He doesn’t leave, not all the way. He stays and watches for a while. Once she’s certain he’s gone, Maureen goes over to Lucretia. She puts a hand on her shoulder and he watches as she takes her weight from the staff. Lucretia rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder, and something bitter twists inside of him. The boy goes over and asks a few things before returning back inside only to be followed out by Davenport a moment later.

He does leave then. He can’t bear to see his captain like that, reduced down to a wordless gnome. He understands what Lucretia did, can see her reasoning, but the fact that she didn’t immediately help their captain by inoculating him with Fisher’s ichor makes it much more difficult to even think of forgiving and working with her.

The body is ready, eventually, and this Barry is much the same. A fighter, magicless, confused and mean. This time, he knows not to go near water alone, and knows that for now his goal is to find Taako.

Which he does! And it’s exciting, because Taako is doing a cooking show. He doesn’t get a chance to talk to him before the show starts, explain what little he knows, but he does get a spot in the audience. He’s one of forty, all piled in to watch and sample. There’s some children here, a few of the older ones without their parents, and everyone seems excited to be there.

There’s a human man with Taako, a large bodyguard that keeps giving the elf nasty looks. Taako cooks with a flourish, changing items into this and that. There’s a berry garnish that he makes that Barry is excited to try. Plus, there’s no milk in the entire dish, so he can eat it without worrying of his allergy acting up.

Thirty Garlic Clove Chicken, as Taako calls it, takes almost the whole show to cook, but the smell coming from it is worth it. And then the samples go out, all with that berry garnish, and Barry can’t wait to dig in.

The bodyguard looks antsy now, and Taako says something quietly up on stage to get him to calm down.

The food tastes amazing, tastes popping on his tongue, and for a moment he’s reminded of home, though he doesn’t know why. His mother never cooked like this.

He finishes his food, and almost immediately his stomach cramps up. It hurts, and it hurts bad. A child is crying a few rows in front of him, and the whole of the audience looks uncomfortable.

One of the younger kids throws up, and amidst the half chewed food there’s a healthy amount of blood.

Barry looks up at the stage, finds Taako staring down at the kid in fear, confused guilt covering his face. His ears are pinned straight against his head, back ramrod straight. He’s terrified.

Why does he know that?

Then Barry throws up, and it’s coated in red. He drags himself out of the crowd of dying people, because the coin that was him and not him had told him to leave if he ever felt like he was dying. He’s not sure why, but he does know it would feel better than dying in that mass of people.

As his body convulses in the back alley he’s found himself, away from the mess of people he was with, the lich rises out of his body.

“What the fuck,” he says hoarsely. “What the fuck.”

Taako would never have messed that up so badly. He’s not even sure what he could have transmuted to make everyone die so instantly like that. Regardless, he needs to go find him.

Taako is nowhere to be found after that, stagecoach having left promptly.

Barry’s at a loss to do. His best friend just accidentally killed forty people, and one of those people was him. Not the him he knew, but still him.

He finds himself in the woods, resting near a tree, energy crackling around him, when the tear happens yet again.

“What a sorry sight,” he says, and Barry doesn’t even bother looking at him.

“What’s your name?” He asks instead of trying to run away.

“I don’t see why I should tell you.”

“If you don’t, it’s fine.” Barry can’t feel anything. That wasn’t Taako. He looked so empty before everyone started dying. “You don’t have to tell me anything.” He still hasn’t found Lup. And Taako wasn’t with her. Lup’s gone. “I just figured if we’re going to keep meeting like this I should know yours. After all. You already know mine.”

“It’s Kravitz,” the reaper says. “You look absolutely awful.”

Barry gives a hollow laugh. “My best friend just accidentally poisoned forty people and I was one of them.”

“That’s quite a feat.”

“Mm,” he says, rising finally. “I really don’t want to fight with you today.”

“Does that mean you’re turning yourself in?”

“Nah,” he says tiredly. “Just means I’m gonna end this quick.”

He throws blight at Kravitz, the close range knocking off his guard. Then casts circle of death just for good measure. Kravitz, looking worse for wear, takes a valiant swing of his scythe at him, that Barry evades easily.

“I’ll be leaving now,” he says, throwing a spell that should keep him in place for a little while.

“Why you little—,” he doesn’t finish that as he’s interrupted from the yell escaping him as his limbs lock up.

Barry leaves to the sound of the old timey curses he keeps letting out, his voice getting farther and farther away. He gathers himself. This is no time to lose it. Or it is. It’s a great time to lose it, but he can’t. He has to keep it together. For Lup if for no one else.

Time blends together again. He keeps making bodies, dying, remaking bodies, getting into the occasional spat with Kravitz that gets tougher each time. He doesn’t run into Lucretia again, and he’s glad. He’s not sure how he’d react. Probably accidentally dragging her into a reaper fight by losing himself to his emotions. He keeps track of the others as best he can. Merle has children and a marriage that he’s left behind, which is kind of the worst outcome for Merle in his opinion. Magnus had a wife, helped lead a revolution, and lost it all. Taako’s the hardest to keep track of, and he doesn’t really manage it. There’s a bounty out for his head, a real one with money as a prize, for the deaths at Glamour Springs.

He doesn’t find Lup.

He’s almost given up hope at this point.

And then he gets a new body, years later, isolation creeping into his lich bones, and meets up with Merle, Magnus, and Taako. He doesn’t remember them, of course, but he feels a sense of family with them, however faint.

He’s killed by Lup’s gauntlet, a part of the first glassing in nearly a decade. It’s a morbid thought that he has when he reforms, but it’s the best death he’s had on this plane. Killed by his lover’s crazy magic fire? Incredible. It’s enough to make him not totally panic when he comes to.

The boys take a sphere up and up and up and- fuck he really hasn’t been paying attention to much. There’s a second moon. One he knows has to be fake. Based on the last time he saw Lucretia and the size of what they were building, he has to assume it’s hers. Alright. Lucretia owns a moon now. Neat. Not what he expected in the slightest.

 And then he sees the sky light up with eyes, white eyes against a dark backdrop, and fear he hasn’t felt in a long time comes crashing into him.

The Hunger’s back, and he’s sure it’s more hungry than ever after being starved of its food source for ten years. He’ll have to act fast, get as much information together as he can before it strikes in a year.

Time moves fast after that. Taako, Merle, and Magnus come back with bracers on their arms, things linking them to the moon. They’re searching for the relics, presumably because they’re the only ones who can resist their thrall, but they don’t seem to remember everything. If they did, he’s certain that at least Taako wouldn’t be working for Lucretia.

So there’s a loophole. A way to let people know some things but not all. His stress levels are rising, because he has no idea what it could possibly be, but he keeps himself under control. He’s a pin drop away from losing himself to the lich, turning into mad energy forever, but he holds it in, holds it together for Lup and his family. They need him more than ever.

He sees a member of Lucretia’s moon crew, a halfling that seems very out of it, and he can probably work with that. He waits until the halfling is done shopping for whatever he needs and then strikes.

Possessing is something he isn’t fond of. Being in another person’s body, especially while their soul is still there, feels gross. But he has to get up there, has to figure out what’s going on.

He presses down on the bracer and waits. A sphere comes down, glass and incredibly built. If he had time to admire, he would.

A human greets him when he gets up there, and he’s cheerful, and Barry learns this body’s name is Robbie.

“Hey,” he says, drawing out the y. The human rolls his eyes.

“Come on, Robbie. Stop getting weird potion high before coming back to work. You know the Director hates that.”

The Director must be Lucretia, he guesses. Barry waves the human off, who looks a little slighted, but doesn’t seem to think it strange. Barry heads off down the hallway, ditching the bag of potion components before heading in the direction he thinks must be towards Lucretia’s quarters. If she has anything, it’ll be there.

The moon is packed full of people, most of them greeting each other when they pass. He gets a couple of hello’s and hi’s and gives vague waves in return. This seems to satisfy people enough. It’s a huge space, the moon is, filled with interesting things. There’s a massive Fantasy Costco in here, and it seems to be the main place people buy their things.

He sneaks his way down and up hallways until he reaches a doorway that seems ornate enough to be the Director of this place’s office. He knocks, and when no one answers, tries to door. It’s locked, of course, but Barry knows the non magic way to pick locks.

The office is empty, a large painting of Lucretia hanging up above the desk. He doesn’t pay much attention to it, looking around for any clues. Another door sits inside, closed and locked as well. He picks that one, and when the door goes off, a ticking starts. He looks up, finds the source, and curses. Of course she’d have an alarm. He jumps up and smack it until it goes silent, breaking it under hands that aren’t his.

There’s a puzzle laid out in front of him, and it takes him time to get it down, but he does it, making his way past the set up and down to the door at the end.

“Get out of my employee,” Lucretia’s voice comes from behind him just as he makes it to the door. “Or I will not hesitate to expel you myself.”

The possession was for stealth, but that jig is up, apparently. He sighs, turns around, and leaves the body. It collapses onto the floor. Barry looks at Lucretia, looks at the stunned faces of the guards she’s brought with her, and doesn’t hesitate to phase through that door.

The room is small, bookshelves covered in the journals. There’s a glow from the corner, and when he looks, he finds a small voidfish. A baby. A second one.

Fisher had a baby. Lucretia has used this to her gain. Fisher has the information on the relics while this baby has the rest.

Lucretia comes in quickly behind him, alone, and he can see the anger on her face.

“I’m sorry about this,” she says, and he almost questions her before she pulls from seemingly nowhere a ward. And that ward is a ward against liches. It rips at him right away, and he can feel himself coming apart, and the only thing he can think to do is to drop though the floor, down and away from that _thing_ she’d gotten to keep him out.

When he gets back to the cave he rests, because that ward was powerful. When he’s a little more present, he thinks about what he’s learned. Baby voidish, that’s how she’s been keeping everyone in the dark. Merle, Taako, and Magnus have no clue what they’re getting into going after the relics, don’t even know what they’re working for, and could probably use some help. He can’t help them with a body. He can help them as a lich. He’ll have to put off having a body for now, but he’ll need one in a year. If he times it right, the body should be ready just before the Hunger strikes.

Alright, Bluejeans. Keep it together. He’s got this. He just… can’t tell them anything, can only hope that they’ll trust him, and can give vague hints at what they’re meant to do so he doesn’t break their brains.

Great.

He meets them first in Goldcliff, saving their lives after Captain Bane tried to poison them. He remembers something Taako said, years ago, about using intimidation as a tactic to give and get information, and if he’s got to be cryptic, he may as well play a part.

It feels good to talk to them again, even if it is through high strung emotions and Magnus tries to hit him. He’s not going to hurt them, he’d never hurt his family, but he does choose to stay vague, and he knows it sounds scary. He leaves before they do, just to feel like he has some sort of handle on this situation

They don’t come back down for a while, and that’s fine. And then it’s Candlenights and suddenly the fake moon is moving very fast across the sky, and Barry figures it’s probably a good time to follow.

There’s another lab in the sky, one glinting pink and shimmery, covered in pink tourmaline. The Stone, then. The teams drop down into the lab and Barry follows. He stays hidden, on the sidelines. Looking around shows him that this must be the Miller’s lab. He hasn’t heard much about them since he last saw Maureen and her son with Lucretia, but if this is the lab then they’ll eventually run into planar research.

And then they’re attacked by a massive crystal monster, and the fighting style seems familiar for some reason but he can’t seem to place it. And then, Merle answers a call from his god behind him, telling him to take the crystal, and Barry gets who it is as he says, “Oh, well, this is gonna be a lot easier than I thought!”

Of course Kravitz is here.

Like his undeath couldn’t get any worse.

It doesn’t seem like he’s here for him, though. Barry doubts he knows he’s here. If he’s here for the other three, then there must be bounties on all of the IPRE’s head’s, for dying an coming back to life so many times.

It doesn’t really matter, because then Magnus takes his axe to Merle’s arm and it’s pretty gruesome, but Merle gets a cool new arm out of it, so that’s a plus.

Lucas, Maureen’s kid, takes them to a room called the Cosmoscope, and he sees all the different planes laid out in front of them. Massive circles of gemstone, mirrors to the other sides. It’s incredibly advanced, he’s well on his way to getting where their home plane did. But this is his time to shine, so he freezes everyone else around them and repeats Merle’s question back at them.

Magnus, of course, tries to hit him with the axe, and when that fails, literally stands in his body to make himself a “red robe,” which is ironic as all get out. He floats up and tries to pick up where he left off, but he looks the three of them over as he does, just to make sure the only thing wrong with them is Merle’s lack of a flesh arm.

And then he sees it.

“Taako?” Taako looks at him. “Taako, where did you find that umbrella?

“Yeah, I took it off this uhh, I took it off this dead thug with a red robe. This dead guy, he had a red robe.” Taako spins the umbrella in his hands.

Barry’s going a little fuzzy, and he can feel himself stammering as the others back up his claims the red robe being “totes dead.”

He knows he’s asking where, but it’s not coming out, and the only coherent thing he can think is “YOU FOUND HER?” And it rips itself out of him as he bursts into flames and he disappears, back to his cave because he _can’t handle this_.

He’s glad that Kravitz is occupied because he’s liching out very hard right now. Everything is crackling and he lets out a scream because he can and he needs to and it’s so hard to keep any semblance of Barry, the Barry they all knew, together because he just want to disappear.

It takes him a good while to get himself under control again. Lup’s a lich, she wouldn’t have just died. But why wouldn’t she have come to find him? Or gone to find Taako? She’s been dead, and her lich is gone, and he doesn’t know what to do.

So he waits, and he watches.

They come down planetside some, to run errands, to have some fun. Merle starts visiting his kids again, and that’s nice to see. He’s trying, really trying, to make a decent connection with them. There’s a little kid that works at the moon, Barry thinks his name is Angus. He follows Merle around, too, trying to figure out where it is he’s been sneaking off to. Barry saves his kids lives by moving the cart out of the way of recklessly hitting them, and when Merle turns and sees him, he gives him a nod before turning away.

They’re going for the chalice next, hidden away in a town called Refuge, locked from the outside world from the time bubble it’s being kept in. They go inside and all he can do is wait for them to come out.

They do come out, right around forty five minutes later, and with them comes a massive purple worm.

Barry tells them he’s proud of them for not taking the Chalice and trying to change their live, and Magnus looks confused.

“Wait- you're proud of- hold on, you're the Red Robe, right? You're one of the bad guys.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everybody,” Merle and Taako say together, and gods that stings. Lucretia’s been telling them lies about him, which is not ideal. And it hurts. They’re meant to be afraid of him, to get away as fast as possible.

“I need to know. Do you trust me?”

He’s met with a chorus of no’s, one particularly strong “Hell no!” from Merle, and Taako starts listing off the things that he’s done that make him entirely untrustworthy and he just

starts to lose it.

He can feel the energy crackling around him, snapping off in places, sees Merle roll out of the way of a particularly rowdy one, and he drops to the ground and clutches his head in his hands.

“Lup, they don't trust me. I can't do it anymore, Lup. I'm sorry.”

He takes a moment, because he can’t lich out, not here, not now. The Hunger is almost here. They still need him. And when he’s composed, he rises back up and tells them they have to trust him next time, it’s incredibly important they trust him, because the Hunger is almost here, and if they don’t trust him, all of this will have been for nothing.

The only relic left is his. Wonderland, Lucretia called it. He’d scoped it out before, gone in to see how the inner workings were. It’s bad. He doesn’t want them to go in there. It’s suffering, plain and simple. They feed off of it, use it to make their sick games with his bell. He’ll need to be there with them, watching out.

It’s worse than he thought it would be. Merle loses an eye, Magnus loses a finger. Taako gets what looks like a washing machine dropped on him. There’s no healing. Taako gives up his looks. He can see how it hurts him. Magnus loses the memory of his wife’s murderer, Merle almost loses the memory of the birth of his kid.

It’s awful.

He hates just sitting in the background, quiet and invisible, and his family gets torn apart by his relic. He finally understands what Lup felt, why she left to go get hers back. He wants to rip the liches apart, tear them to shreds, but now isn’t the time.

Taako casts true sight on Magnus, and he remarkably doesn’t say anything to the others.

And then Magnus’s soul gets cast out of his body, towards the Astral Plane, and Taako fucking magic jar’s himself to get him back, and the Merle drags them all back in together. Magnus lives inside of a mannequin now, while they fight Edward and Lydia to get both the bell and his body back.

And then Edward gets thrown out of Magnus’s body. The Umbrastaff turns inside out, dragging him inside of it, and then a few moments later, after jumping around, spits him back out, disintegrated and wholly destroyed.

Barry stares at the umbrella in horror. Lup died with that thing. Lup’s lich came out and got eaten and spit out by that thing. The Umbrastaff eats liches, kills liches.

Lup’s gone.

He can’t let himself dwell on that, there’s so much to do. So if his soul feels completely frazzled and held together by bad tape, that’s fine. Lup’s gone, it’s okay. It’s fine. No one else remembers her but him and Lucretia anyways. Why would it matter?

Barry takes their stones, hears that little kid, Angus, speaking through Taako’s, and crushes them in his hand. There’s work to be done, Hunger to be defeated, a body to get into. He’ll hide in Taako’s pocket spa, come out when the time is right.

Of course that plan goes to shit, because the little kid knows zone of truth, but he saves them all from immediate arrest all the same. They all get inoculated and Barry, used to losing and getting his memories the most, recovers the fastest. Merle and Taako are trying their best, and then Lucretia comes in with Davenport, and she looks horrified at the three of them, and Davenport takes the ichor from them, and Barry forces him to drink it, and then Lucretia is made to explain.

Magnus come in in the middle of all of this, and Barry takes the ichor back from their captain, placing it in Magnus’s hands and forcing him to drink, quietly going through their century with him. When that’s done, he throws it to the half orc and the dragonborn, telling them to drink it.

Taako points the Umbrastaff at Lucretia and starts counting down. Barry isn’t sure what to do here. He doesn’t want her hurt, he just needs her to understand what she did to all of them. The counting stops, and Taako has that hollow look in his eyes again, where he looks like he’s dead, and Lucretia looks pained.

The Hunger drops through the ceiling and their real fight begins. Angus is not terrible at fighting, but he is very little, so when the hand smack him across the room, he’s not very surprised. When the kid casts a massive fireball out of Lup’s umbrella, Taako takes it back and hold it in front of him, there’s a tense second, and then he snaps it over his knee.

The resounding explosion knocks him back, and the fire that weaves around all of them spikes his heart rate and he stares at the air as Lup rises from the two pieces of her prison. She gets rid of the Hunger that was in the room with them, rising through the air wreathed in flame.

And her first words to anyone in ten years are to her brother.

“You’re dating the grim reaper?!”

Barry files that away to deal with later as he walks over to her. He can feel his body shaking. He can’t hold her like this, can’t hug her or kiss her or touch her hair when she’s incorporeal like that.

He offers to blow himself up to hold her, very ready to do it, and she stops him, tells him to wait for the Hunger to be dead for their reunion time. And then Lucretia disappears, along with the Light.

They’re sent to go find the Starblaster, get it ready to go. Lup derails that plan, sending them down to the ground. Taako sets on turning the glassy remains of Phandolin into a massive sapphire circle, and him and Lup get to work on killing some of these Hunger creatures.

And then Taako is… cooking? In his stagecoach. That he definitely got from somewhere. And he’s yelling into this tiny emerald mirror, and then his stagecoach blows up, and Taako’s practically glowing, and he sets his hands down and the glass turns into sapphire and Kravitz comes out in the middle of it, and it looks like Barry is going to have to push whatever feelings he has about that down even further. Taako introduces him briefly to Lup, and Kravitz mentions talking about the fact that she’s a lich and Barry bristles but gets back to what he was doing.

They find the Starblaster with the help of Lucas, and Lucretia is back, and Taako suggest cutting the Hunger off instead of cutting the plane off, and Barry wonders why they never thought of that.

Merle and Magnus and Lup all hug Lucretia, and Taako, Davenport, and Barry are all standing uncomfortably, definitely not getting into that.

The fight is long and hard and scary and he definitely almost dies a lot, but somehow he doesn’t lose his body in the fight, and the Hunger disappears into white light, and then the five people that were on the ship are now on the ground in front of him, and they’re shouting about some god named Jeffandrew. Barry turns towards Lup and hugs her as much as he can. She hugs him back, and it’s warm and feels like home and he kind of wants to cry but he won’t. Magnus hoists Angus up in the air and he yells to the world that they won.

It’s a long while of rebuilding, and those first couple hours after the Hunger is defeated are spent resting up on the moon in Merle, Magnus, and Taako’s apartment. Angus clambers into Taako’s bed and drags Taako down with him. The kid falls asleep first.

“So,” Barry says, sitting on the ground next to the bed. “You got a kid?”

“Fuck off,” Taako says lightly. Magnus plops down on the bed next to him, and Merle next. Lup floats between Taako and Barry. “He’s not my kid, he’s my student.”

The way he’s affectionately petting a hand over the kid’s hair says otherwise, but Barry doesn’t say anything about that. Lup pipes up from next to them. “He threw him off a train.”

Barry raises an eyebrow and Taako shoots a look at his sister. “Yeah, to save his dumb stupid life. It was either leave him on the train and he died or throw him off the train and trust that his cushy kid body took care of the fall. Which it did.”

He curls an arm protectively around him, but Barry doesn’t mention it. Instead, he says, “You’re dating Kravitz?”

“How do you know who that is?” Taako asks, narrowing his eyes. “I understand Lup knowing, but you?”

“I’m a lich. There’s a bounty on my head. We ran into each other a couple times.”

“Shit,” Taako mutters. “We’re gonna have to talk about that. You two are liches, and I’m dating the guy who takes care of them. Yikes.”

“I’m sure there’s some way to get off the hook,” Lup says.  “We did kinda save the world.”

Taako falls asleep soon after, arms wrapped around Angus as they both sleep. It’s not long before Merle and Magnus doze off too. Then it’s just him and Lup, Lucretia back in her quarters and Davenport off on his own.

“You’re back,” he says quietly.

“I am,” she says, floating down to sit next to him. She phases her hand to rest inside of his and it’s warm. “I’m back. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I thought, when Edward got spit out of the Umbrastaff, I thought that’s what had happened to you. I thought it had killed you completely and I’d never see you again.”

“You think that thing can beat me?” She shudders a little. “I mean, it sucked. Being trapped in an umbrella for ten years? Would not recommend. But I never died. I beat up that stupid lich in there. I killed him, not the staff.”

“Thank the gods,” he breathes out. “I don’t know what I’d do.”

“What about you, bone boy? What’d you do for ten years?”

He’s quiet, contemplating. “A lot of waiting,” he says eventually. “I lived in a cave and tried to keep it together and grew myself a new body every couple of months and tried not to get too emotional so I wouldn’t have to get into it with Taako’s reaper boyfriend. It was lonely.”

“Shit,” he says immediately after. “It sounds like I’m complaining. I didn’t get stuck in an umbrella for ten years, jeez. It wasn’t that lonely. I—”

“Babe,” she says, strained. “Please don’t. You… that sounds bad. It sounds like it was shitty. You don’t have to tone down your hurts just ‘cause you think I went through something worse. A decade all alone is still a decade all alone, no matter where you spend it.”

“I really wish I could hold you right now,” he says instead of accepting that. She had it worse. He knows it. She has to know it too. “I wish you had a body right now so I could hold you and feel you and know you’re real again.”

“I’m real,” she whispers. “We’ll figure out a way for me to get my body back. I know it.”

He doesn’t sleep a lot that night, just sits next to her, keeping watch, waiting. He forgets that human bodies need to rest and falls asleep eventually, but wakes back up with a jerk when he hears voices.

“Look who’s awake,” Taako says. “Lup says you got like zero sleep last night.”

“Didn’t wanna wake up and have it all be gone again.”

Taako is quiet and Barry realizes that’s a little dark for the world finally being saved. “Sorry.”

“It’s all good, my dude. Krav wants to meet up today, if we can. Figure out what we’re gonna do about you and Lup. I told him he’s not taking you two away and he agreed, so I guess you don’t gotta worry about that.”

They meet up after breakfast, which Taako refuses to cook so Barry takes over. He’s got a little bit of culinary skill, not nearly as much as Lup and Taako, but enough to cook breakfast. Taako looks at him a lot while he’s cooking, and he wonders if he remembers all the faces in the audience that died. There’s no hard feelings from Barry, neither of them had their memories then and Lucretia erased all of Taako’s magic, but he’s still curious about what exactly killed him.

Seeing Kravitz outside of him trying to kill him is interesting. They’re in the living room, having kicked everyone else out. Kravitz leans against a wall.

“I’d like to start off with a sorry,” he says to Barry. “For trying to kill you all those times.”

“I get it,” Barry says. “It is kind of your job.”

“And hello,” he says to Lup. Lup gives him a spectral wave from beside Barry. Taako’s sitting on the couch between both parties, glancing between them. “It’s, um, nice to meet you.”

“Ditto, my guy,” Lup says. “Cool of you to not kill my brother. And also date him. Sorry for trying to kill you that one time.”

“When- Oh! With the umbrella, after our date. Yes, right, you were there… for that…”

“So, about us being liches,” Barry says, wanting to get this conversation over as soon as possible. “What will you do about that?”

“Well, there are laws,” Kravitz says, standing up a little straighter. “And we can’t exactly break them.”

“Krav,” Taako says in warning. “Where exactly are you going with this?”

“Rules can be bent,” he says to Taako. “The Raven Queen can’t allow you to walk around as liches on your own free will, but she might be amenable to a deal of sorts.”

“What kinda spooky deal are we talking?” Lup seems interested.

“If the two of you became reapers, the Raven Queen would be able to keep an eye on you. She might treat it a bit like community service. In working for her your lich powers wouldn’t be an extension of you anymore but of her.”

“Would she agree to that? Would _you_ agree to that? You always seemed pretty eager to catch a lich and put them in their ‘rightful place,’” Barry asks.

“Yes, well, things can change. Rules are rules, but this way we’re not breaking them, just bending a little.”

“I’d be down,” Lup says. “Taking down evil undead dudes with a cool scythe? Working for a giant bird? Sounds super cool.”

“I guess that would be fine. What exactly would the job entail?”

“Well, looking after souls, making sure ones don’t escape, returning escapees to the stockade, taking those who break the laws of death to the stockade, stuff like that.”

“I assume there’s a training period where you’re with us for most of the time.”

“Well, yes. You’d accompany me for a while to make sure you know the rules and expectations of the job, and then you’d be on your own. It’s likely we’d be put together for bigger missions, and more reapers are always needed.”

“Sure,” Barry says. “We’d get to live on this plane, right? We wouldn’t have to live in the Astral Plane.”

“Yes, you could live in whatever plane you liked, but the Queen would be in direct contact with you always, calling you away when she needs you.”

“Babe, I think it’s a good idea. If we refuse, we get chucked in forever prison, and I’d really rather not do forever prison.”

“Yeah, yeah alright. We’ll be ghost cops.” Taako snorts from the couch. “When do we meet with your Queen? I still have some questions I’d like to ask her.”

“Soon,” he says. “There are some things to look over, what with all the new souls and reviewing those in the stockade for their service in the fight against the Hunger, but within the next few days for sure. I’ll be in contact with you about it.”

When they do meet with the Raven Queen, Barry is ready. They agree to her terms, agree to become reapers, but Barry pulls out the note that Lup left, signed with a kiss, her DNA on the paper.

“I need to make her a body, please. One last breaking of the rules and then we’re done.”

The Raven Queen cocks her head. “ _I could provide her with a spectral body, but you insist on a physical one? The powers will be the same. Both of you will be able to lose your physical forms at will and travel between planes, but you want to go through the time of getting her a physical one?_ ”

“It would feel a little more real,” he says. “But it’s up to her.”

“I think having a real physical body would be better, if that’s an option. I’ve spent a long time as a specter, and I am ready to get back into the flesh and bones, even if I can lose the flesh whenever I want working for you.”

“ _Very well. In the time it takes for that body to become a reality, you’ll be going through a sort of orientation with Kravitz. You will accompany him on missions, small ones. He will teach you the rules of this job, the way to do the magic of this job, and you will learn. And you will follow these rules. This opportunity is a kindness and a thanks, but I still expect you to uphold my laws of life and death.”_

Barry sets up the tank and puts Lup’s note inside. It’ll take a few months, but those few months are for rebuilding, for getting their family back together.

Taako buys a house and he asks to two of them if they’d stay there. At least while they get back on their feet. Lup agrees enthusiastically and Barry does as well. And then Taako asks Angus if he’d like a place to stay, just for when he’s not away doing his nerdy school stuff, of course.

Barry is there when he asks him, helping Taako pack up. Taako takes Angus into a separate room and closes the door and when they come back out Angus’s eyes look a little damp and Taako’s holding his hat down in front of his face.

“The kid’s staying there too,” Taako says later that day. “At the house, with the rest of us.”

“Sounds good.” Then Barry thinks for a second. “Awful bold to have your student live at your house.”

Taako hits him on the arm. “He’s still not my kid.”

“Okay,” Barry gives, but he’s smiling, and Taako scowls.

Once they’re moved in it’s a little less hectic. Lup’s body is still growing, but all of their stuff has been moved into their room. The piano is there, along with Lup’s violin, things they’d gotten from Lucretia. The pictures are up on the walls, clothes back in a dresser, bedding on an actual bed. The body tank is moved into the basement of the house, just for now. It’s to be destroyed once Lup’s body is done, the other tank in the back of Fantasy Costco already having met its fate.

A letter comes for Taako in the mail one day, when they’re almost done getting set up. Barry catches that it’s from Glamour Springs before Taako snatches it up and goes to his room to read it alone. Barry doesn’t see the letter again, but Taako comes out of the room with his jaw set and he goes back to working on unpacking.

They’ll have to have that conversation eventually. Barry’s fairly certain Taako remembers he was there, but he refuses to bring it up. He still isn’t coking all that much for them, which is stressing Lup out because no one will tell her what’s wrong with her brother. In Barry’s opinion it’s Taako’s business, but if he doesn’t tell her soon, he’ll do it himself.

Kravitz is there sometimes. It only makes sense. Him and Taako are dating after all. It’s interesting to see Taako interact with the people that weren’t his family but are slowly making their way to be. As much as he says Angus isn’t his kid, it’s obvious how he feels about him, the way he wants to keep him safe. Kravitz is an interesting phenomenon. Taako never made romantic bonds on any of the planes they landed on, for good reason. Seeing him with a partner, in a relationship where they both seem very invested, is nice.

“Taako,” he says one morning when it’s just the two of them there. Angus is off with Magnus and Kravitz is teaching Lup some specifics that he taught Barry the other day. “We gotta talk.”

His hands grip the mug of tea he’s holding tighter, and he tilts his head. “What about?”

“Glamour Springs.”

“Mm, do we? I think we really don’t. There’s not really a reason to—”

“I was there,” he says, and Taako slumps.

“I know.”

“What happened?”

“So see, the funny thing is,” Taako says, hopping his leg underneath the table. “I deffo thought it was my fault for like the longest. Oh, idiot wizard Taako fucked up the transmutation on the elderberries and made nightshade, whoops.”

“Nightshade doesn’t react like that—”

“Oh believe me, I know.” He swallows harshly. “It acts a lot different, and no one got enough to kill them except maybe the kids, and even then they wouldn’t have started throwing up blood. So, like, I know this, but it’s still the only think I could think of. Other than accidentally putting glass in it, and y’all would’ve noticed that while chewing.”

“Then what was it?”

“Apparently. Apparently! My fucking bodyguard dude, Sazed, got so pissed off at me not letting him be a part of the cooking portion of the show that he tried to kill me! Cool and fun and fun and neat, right? I always taste tested when I was cooking. Always. Dunno why I didn’t that day. It’s a good thing I didn’t, though, because he put arsenic in the fucking food. So instead of just me dying, forty innocent people died instead. And that, my dude, is why you got killed by me, chaboy, Taako.”

Barry doesn’t really know what to say. “Taako… that’s—”

“Don’t you get all pitying on me now, Bluejeans. I don’t need that.”

“That’s why you don’t cook for anyone but yourself anymore, right?”

“Mmm,” he hums in agreement. “I know it’s not my fault, but, y’know, old habits die hard.”

“Why haven’t you told Lup?”

“Same reason you avoid talking about what went down while you were alone with her. No one wants to complain to the person who was trapped alone in an umbrella for ten years.”

He’s got a point, a really good one. “You should tell her, though. She’s really worried about you.”

“She’s worried about you too, homie. I don’t see you dropping all your isolation trauma on her.”

“I don’t- isolation trauma? That’s not- I don’t have that. If anyone has that it’s Lup. She’s the one that got stuck in an umbrella for ten years. It’s not like I never saw anybody.”

Taako raises an eyebrow and takes a drink of his tea. That’s all the more he needs to say really. Barry drops into the seat next to him and drops his head on the table.

“Fuck,” he mutters into the wood.

“My sentiments exactly.”

He’s been a little more antsy, if he’s being honest with himself. A little more eager to stick next to one of his family, to any other person. Taako might be a little bit right, but he doesn’t want to admit that.

“I’m worried I’ll wake up and it’ll all be gone again. You, her, Merle, everyone. That I’ll be back in that cave, waking up in a new body. Forgetting everything that makes me Barry, and then I’ll die and remember all the hurts all over again and it’ll just keep going like that forever.”

“Yeah,” Taako says, and it’s quiet and serious. “Sometimes I think this will all have been some fucked up dream and I’ll wake up on my own again. Just Taako. No Lup. No Starblaster. Just Taako the idiot wizard who killed forty people because he couldn’t give a guy what he wanted.”

“I think we’re a little fucked up, buddy.”

Taako snorts. “A little? Just a little? Yeah alright you tell yourself that and I’m gonna be living in my truth of Taako’s real fucked up and he’s gonna keep it inside forever until he dies.”

The sound of fabric ripping draws his attention and from the rip in reality floats out Lup and Kravitz. Lup’s holding a scythe in her spectral hands and she runs it down the rift, closing it up. Then she lets go of the scythe and it puffs up into the air.

“Yes!” She exclaims. “Opened a closed a rift by _myself_ , no help from skeletor over here, successfully. Who’s the reaper now, babe? It’s me.”

“Technically, I’m still a reaper and you’re still in training, but that was a good rift.”

“You’re godsdamn right it was. What’s up with you two?” She motions between them. “The moods looking a little somber.”

“Just talking,” Barry says, giving her a small smile. “Rift making looks like it’s going good.”

Lup makes a disapproving noise and he shrugs. Not like he wants to get into this conversation in front of their boss anyway.

“Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll just needle it out of you or Taako later.”

Barry shoots a look at Taako, who’s giving the same look to Barry, and it’s an agreements not to mention the other’s stuff if she makes them talk. Lup lets out a groan and Taako smirks.

“Come on, you think we’re gonna give up each other’s shit that easy? Barry and I got a lot of shit on each other. If one person broke, the whole set up would collapse.”

“It’s true,” Barry says, stealing Taako’s mug and taking a drink. Taako makes a squawk of protest but doesn’t reach to take it back. Barry pauses at the taste, and then turns to look at him. “Are you drinking a hot toddy at eleven in the morning?”

“It’s healthy and refreshing,” Taako says, taking his cup back. “Besides, time is an illusion that I don’t abide by.”

“Fair,” Barry says, leaning back in his chair. “But day drinking is never great.”

“Time is an illusion, Barold, keep up.”

Lup dramatically summons her scythe and rips a hole in reality right next to her and Kravitz, who jumps a little. “Come on, bone man, these two are being massive bummers. Let’s go learn some more cool reaper tricks.”

She floats through the rift and Kravitz follows her after giving a small wave to Taako. He gives him a big dramatic wave and takes another gulp of his drink. The rift closes back up and Barry lays his head back on the table. He hears Taako laugh quietly and feels a hand pat on his shoulders.

“Yeah, bud, me too.”

Angus seems to take a liking to him fairly quickly. He’s a little skittish around him at first, pulling out a notebook and writing some things down when they’re talking. He reminds him of a younger Lucretia, which hurts to think about but also make him incredibly endearing. Angus does the writing thing with everyone, it seems, not just people he’s not comfortable with. He writes around Taako a lot, and Barry catches a glimpse of his writing one night.

There’s a massive analysis on his facial expressions and the way he holds himself and his body parts and the way they relate to his emotions. Angus catches him reading and slams the notebook shut, clutching it tightly in his hands.

Taako looks up then, looking at how tense Angus is to the apologetic look on Barry’s face and his eyes narrow.

“What are you doing to my magic boy, Barry?”

“I just saw he was writing, I didn’t mean to freak him out.” He turns to face Angus, who’s looking at him with wide eyes. “Sorry, I should have asked if I could read it first. I get personal writing.”

“But—”

Barry puts his hands up and smiles. “It’s none of my business what you write, kid.”

The fearful look leaves him a little and he relaxes back into his chair. He doesn’t open the notebook back up until Barry’s across the room, and that’s fine. If the kid wants in depth analyses on all of them, he can have them.

“Taako snaps his fingers when he’s frustrated with someone,” he tells him quietly the next morning. “Especially if he frustrated with them about something to do with him.”

Angus sits and stares at him for a while before pulling out his notebook and marking it down. He’s smiling at the paper, and Barry counts it as a win. Angus gets him later, when Lup and Taako are out doing some magic tests in the backyard.

“You’re not weirded out by me writing about all of you?”

“Not really. If it makes you feel more comfortable here, I’d pretty much tell you to do whatever. Besides, I lived with Lucretia for a hundred years, and she wrote down every single thing that we did.”

“That’s why I’m worried about it making you upset, sir.”

Barry sighs and rubs at his face. “We don’t know each other that well yet, but you’re not Lucretia. And even if you two were more alike, Taako and I have an issue with Lucretia, not you. And even with her it’s… complicated. She’s still family. And you’re family now too. So, you don’t have to worry about us being upset about you writing down how we show our emotions. Reading people is hard, and if that’s how you remember everyone’s different quirks, then it’s fine.”

Angus nods.

“Also you don’t have to call me sir if you don’t want to. Just Barry is fine.”

He nods again and writes it down. Barry smiles and so does Angus.

“Come on, I bet Taako’ll want you to show off to Lup.”

Angus casts a small but impressive fireball at a target set up in the backyard, and Lup gives him pointers on how to make it bigger and keep the same energy up behind it.

When her body is finally done, he double checks all the vitals, just to make sure everything’s perfect for her. He doesn’t want anything to go wrong, for her to have to wait any longer for her body.

Lup sets up the red robe she’ll be getting into after getting out of the tank, looks at her body floating in the green liquid, and turns back to Barry one last time. “Here goes nothing,” she says, giving him one last ghostly hug before melding into her body.

She bursts out a few seconds later, almost completely destroying the tank. Her legs are wobbling and she coughs a couple times, wiping at her eyes. Barry hands her a towel and then the robe. She looks down at herself before she wraps herself up. “Man, I forgot how good I look.”

He can’t help but laugh, and she catches sight of him. “I’m about to smooch your fucking brains out, babe.”

She takes a step towards him and her legs kind of give out, and he catches her under the arms and she surges forward to press their lips together. And then he’s kissing Lup. He’s holding Lup. He’s touching Lup. For the first time in over a decade. He wraps his arms around her and pulls her in close and she lets out this little noise with her voice, her actual voice, made with real life vocal chords, and something thick and heavy lodges itself in his throat.

“Man, that’s nice,” she says, pulling back. And then her face gets kinda funny and a little blurry and she swipes a thumb under his eye. “Aw babe, don’t cry. If you cry I’m gonna cry.”

Now that it’s been acknowledged that he’s crying, he lets out a hiccupped sob and pulls her in close, pressing his face into her shoulder. “You’re back.”

“Yeah, babe, I’m back,” she says, voice wobbling. “I’m back, I’m back.”

She can’t walk right away, legs not used to holding up any weight for ten years, and Barry holds her up as they walk back to their room. It’s okay, though, because Barry doesn’t really want to take his hands off of her now that she’s really here back in her body again.

“I want,” she says when he sets her on the bed, “a shower. This tank stuff feels nasty.”

“Yeah, yeah okay. Do you want, like, hold and or company? Or do you just want like a sit down shower? Or a bath? Or—”

“Babe, just come get in the fucking shower with me.”

“Alright.”

It’s nice. Warm. She leans on him and kind of forgets how to talk because she hasn’t felt warmth and water pressure in years, so he washes her hair and scrubs off the tank goop and holds her close and it’s the most comfortable he’s felt in a long, long time.

“Everything is a lot,” Lup says once she’s dressed in comfortable baggy clothing, wet hair tied up in a messy bun. “Like, every sensation feels like, _more_.”

“I forgot that was a thing,” Barry says. “Getting into a new body after a long time of being a lich feels kind of awful at first. The sensory overload goes away after a while. So does the wobbly legged-ness.”

“I want to go see Taako, and then I want to take a long, long nap in a really dark room with lots of soft blankets and you because I haven’t fucking slept in eleven years.”

“That can be arranged.”

Taako’s cooking when they get out there. Lup’s favorites. She’s asked him to cook for her first meal, and he could never say no to her.

“Hey, look who’s finally out of the tank!”

Lup spreads her arms out big and grin. “It’s me! Your wonderful twin sister!”

“Hell yeah!”

Angus is helping Taako cook, getting in as much time with him as he can before he has to leave to start at Lucas’s school. “Hello miss Lup!”

“Hello yourself! Now we get to formally real body meet. Lemme shake your fancy hand, mister man.”

Angus offers his hand to her and she shakes it vigorously, making Angus laugh. Taako stops cooking and offers out an arm, which Lup slides into easily. “Aw, you two making my favorites?”

“Can’t have a new body day without eating your favorites.”

When it’s done, he takes a minute just holding the plate, staring down at it, before Angus gently touches his forearm and takes the plate from him, placing it down in front of Lup. Then does the same for Barry’s plate. And then, before Taako can do anything about it, grabs his own plate and takes a massive bite from it. He offers that plate to Taako as he finishes chewing and swallowing, and he seems to come back to himself a bit., shoving the plate back into his hands with a smile.

“You gonna offer me your half eaten plate, bubeleh? Nope, I’ll take my own full one, thank you.” He scoops himself up a plate and sits on Lup’s free side. Angus sits next to him and continues to dig into his food.

Taako watches anxiously as Lup takes her first bite, and then her second, and by the third he’s relaxed a bit. Barry’s eating his own plate and it is, of course, good. Angus has been learning how to cook better, and how to put literally any flavor in his food. He’d heard about the macaron mishap. It really is a feat to make a perfect macaron in everything but having any flavor.

Lup is fine, of course. The food isn’t poisoned, no matter how many nervous looks Taako gives their plates. She seems to gain some energy from the food, but still looks pretty ready to pass out whenever they make it back to their room.

“I,” Lup says, pushing her empty plate out from in front of her, “am going to take the best, biggest nap I’ve had in years, and I’m gonna take jeans man with me, just so both of you know what’s happening with new body Lup.”

Taako waggles his eyebrows and Lup gives him a shove. “Nah, that’s for later.”

Angus makes a face and Barry snickers. Lup stands up, jelly legged but upright, and takes a tentative step forward. When she doesn’t immediately topple over, she lets out a whoop and takes another step. And then another, and one more. And she walks them back to their bedroom with careful steps.

“Bed,” she says firmly, and then flops on top of it. She kicks her pants off and rolls under the covers, head propped on the pillow. Barry hits the lights off and closes the blinds. The room gets shrouded in darkness, and as he moves to take his own pants off Lup makes a noise.

“Maybe, uh, leave the blinds open? Just some, haha, some ambiance light, or something.”

He reopens the blinds and looks at her. She’s gripping at the pillow, but it relaxes as a little bit of light enters the room. Right. Umbrella for ten years. Entirely in the dark with no sensations whatsoever. He finishes slipping his jeans off and crawls into bed next to her. She grabs ahold of him and doesn’t let go.

“Of all the things I missed being in that umbrella, sleeping was a big one. Right next to hot showers, Taako, and you.”

“Glad to know where I sit on the list,” he teases, wrapping his arms around her. She grumbles something about him knowing what she means before settling her head down right next to him, blinking slowly.

“Get some sleep,” he says quietly. “You need it, after ten years of never sleeping. I’m right here. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

She falls asleep quickly, and Barry, hard as he tries, goes down with her. The bed is soft, and her weight against him is so comfortable, he can’t help it.

He still wakes up before her, groggy and a little bit confused at the fact that she’s there and he’s holding her. She’s real. She’s back. Lup is back. He can touch her, if he wants. And he does, brushing a stray hair behind her ear. She murmurs in her sleep, face scrunching up at the touch. He draws his hand back like it’s been stung. She’s real, Lup’s real, she’s right there beside him.

Barry drags himself out of the bed and pulls his glasses on. Lup is real, she’s real. She’s back, she’s not disappearing. He made her body. Glowing in the basement of their shared house with Taako and Angus and sometimes Kravitz.

He stumbles his way into the hallway, walking until his legs give out and he slides back against the wall, legs half bent against the wood floor. His head finds his hands and he clutches at it, trying to breathe.

Lup’s back, he tells himself. She’s right there in the bedroom. He can wake her up. She’ll wake up.

Vaguely he hears small footsteps come down the hallway and pause. There’s a voice, maybe, high pitched and questioning. The feet shuffle and then leave quickly, pitter pattering back down the way they came until he can’t hear them anymore.

He can’t really breathe, but it’s fine. Lup’s back. He keeps repeating that in his head. If he repeats it, it’s true. If he repeats it, she won’t go away again.

Bigger footsteps this time, continuing down the hallway, faltering for a second as they turn the corner. The feet stop in front of him, the body crouches down in front of him, and Taako’s face comes into view.

“Hey, my dude. You good?”

“Lup’s back.”

His face twists up a bit. “Yeah, she’s back.”

“She’s back,” his voice cracks and the twisted up look falls. Taako offers up a hand and Barry takes it, squeezing tightly. He presses his forehead against the knuckles and closes his eyes, trying to breathe. “She’s back, Lup’s back, she’s back and she’s real.”

“Lup’s back,” Taako repeats back to him. “She’s back, and she’s got her body, and she’s gonna stay like that for a long, long time.”

Barry chokes on a sob and Taako sighs, sitting down in front of him. He offers his other hand and Barry takes that one too. “Just focus on the now, Barold. Look at me and tell me what’s real.”

“You are,” he starts. “This house. Lup. Lup’s real and lying in bed right now. She’s in her body. She has a body. I have a body. I’m… I’m here and so are you, and Angus is… somewhere. I think. Lup’s real. Lup’s back. She’s not gone and she’s not leaving.”

“Good. All that’s real. All that’s true. You gettin’ me?”

He nods against his fingers, taking a deep breath. Taako squeezes his hand with a steady beat, and Barry feels his heartbeat slow to match it. He breathes in time with it, in an out and in and out until he’s leveled his breathing out and can breathe by himself. He opens his eyes and blinks a couple times.

Oh neat. He just had a breakdown in the hallway wearing a t-shirt and his underwear. That’s always good.

“Happens to the best of us, my guy,” Taako says, and damn, he’d been talking out loud. “Don’t worry about it too much. Not like you were down here alone all that long. Ango heard something weird and went to check it out and bam! There you were freaking out against the wall.”

“Shit,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Psh, like the kid hasn’t seen the same fucked up shit we have. He’s fine. If you really want to, you can apologize to him later when you have actual pants on, but he’s not gonna accept it. You didn’t really do anything wrong after all.”

He lets go of Taako’s hands and scrubs at his face. “Didn’t think that would happen.”

“What, you freaking out after finally getting to hold her again after eleven years? Cut yourself to slack.”

“I missed her a lot,” he says to his bare knees. “This feels like a dream.”

Taako pinches his arm hard and Barry yelps. “There you go. Real. Now get up and go talk about it with her.”

“Wh-what?”

“You heard me. I’m a little tired of you keeping it all in your head and you making yourself think she had it so much worse than you when you’re obviously pretty fucked up about it. I already had my ‘some fucked up shit went down’ chat with her, so now it’s your turn.”

“It’s her first day back, I don’t want… I don’t want to ruin it.”

“Don’t act like she hasn’t been back for six months. You’ve had plenty of time to go over it, but now you gotta do it. I’m not watching you beat yourself up anymore.”

“You drive a hard bargain Taako. By which I mean there’s no bargain, you just make people do things.”

“Mhm, now get up and either talk it out or go back to bed and talk it out when you’re both awake. Go. Get. Skedaddle.”

He clambers to his feet with a little help from Taako, shuffling back into his room. Lup’s sitting up in bed, making little swirls in the air with a wand. She catches sight of him and pauses.

“You look awful,” she says, sitting even more up. “What happened?”

“Freaked out in the hallway,” he says truthfully. “Everything kind of feels like a dream right now and I don’t want to wake up.”

“I’m right here,” she says gently. “Come back on the bed?”

He complies, resting his head against her shoulder. She pets a hand through his hair, movements a little jerky still.

“Taako says I should tell you about my ten years.”

“Taako’s right,” she says. “I know it wasn’t good. And I know you don’t want to tell me because you think being trapped in the vore umbrella was worse.” He snorts and feels her smile against his head. “But I don’t care if you think that was worse. I wanna know about your bad years.”

So he tells her, about dying and the cave and finding Davenport like he was. About creating a new body and dying too quickly after. Finding Lucretia again, being confused by everything she chose to do, the way he’s not sure he wants to forgive her yet, but it’s hard because she was like his little sister for such a long time. He tells her about dying at Glamour Springs, all the hurt and anger that dredged up, finding Taako with the Umbrastaff, learning her body was dead. The last year of constant watching and waiting and all the distrust he got from Merle and Magnus and Taako. Feeling like any moment he’s going to wake up in the cave, forgetting everything, back in a new body that doesn’t understand why it’s mad and sad and so utterly alone.

Lup doesn’t move during all of this. She stays steady and present and holds him tight when it gets to be so much, and when he’s done she hums out a sigh.

“Shit, babe. _Shit_. You’ve been keeping that all shoved in there for six months? And you expected me to just dismiss that as not as bad?”

“I mean, no. I knew you wouldn’t do that. That’s all me thinking that.”

“Fuck, Barry. I mean, I’m super glad you told me, but I really wish you’d told me sooner.”

“Figured you’d say that,” Barry pulls back and looks at her. She swipes her thumbs under his eyes and smiles at him. “Didn’t feel like burdening you with all that.”

“You’re not a burden. I love you, so godsdamn much. And I’m so sorry I left. But you are not a burden. Never. I could never think that.”

“I think I might be a little fucked up.”

“You know,” she giggles a little. “That’s what Taako told me you’d say if we ever had this conversation. And he told me to tell you that you’re probably super fucked up, but it’s okay. I’m here, and I’m not planning on going anywhere else anytime soon, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Alright. You wanna get back into bed and sleep? Get back into bed and have some fun? Or get _out_ of bed and go hang out with the fam? Up to you.”

“It’s your first day back in your body.”

“Uh huh, and I want you to choose what we do next.”

“…Get out of bed. And invite Merle, Magnus, and Davenport over.”

She doesn’t mention the lack of Lucretia in that list, but she nods, slipping her comfy pants back on as she slides off the bed. “Got it. You get some pants on and I’ll go call those nerds up for some quality family time.”

Davenport declines, out at sea right now, but he does say he’ll make a point to visit the next time he docks. Magnus insists on bringing Johann the dog with him, which Taako begrudgingly accepts. Merle comes alone, Mavis and Mookie off with their mother. He pulls Barry into a hug when he sees him, and Barry returns it by crouching down so it works a little better.

“You doing alright, kid?”

“Not the best, but I think it’ll work out,” he says. Merle takes that answer with a nod and goes to rummage around in their cupboards for something to eat.

Magnus sets up a game of spoons, and it’s different from the last time he played on the Starblaster. Angus, when not the first one to grab the spoon, always grabs the second. He’s very adept at watching the table and watching all of them. It ends up with Lup and Angus at the end, and Barry knows that she would consider giving him the win if he wouldn’t take it as a slight. Angus beats her anyway, snatching the last spoon up from the table and letting out a happy little yell.

It’s not the family he started life out with, one mother in a small town surrounded by people who knew the bare minimum of magic. It’s not even the same family he spent a hundred years with, through death and undeath and learning how to love all of them. It’s a lot of the same people, but he’s missing a few and he’s gained one. Lup is back, and they’re all a little more messed up, but they’re together right now and it feels like home.

Barry Bluejeans thinks he’s very okay with that.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Welcome to my novel sized love letter to Barold J Bluejeans. This was meant to be 10k tops, and here we are 50,000 words later. I've been working on this since the beginning of April, and it's been a long and wild ride of writing. I really, really hope you all enjoy this one. I've put a lot of love into this fic, and it's possibly the best and favorite thing that i've ever written.  
> That being said, if you're reading these, you read it! And thank you so much for reading! PLease leave a comment if you liked it, or even if you didn't.


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